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Price, 25 C«nts
^
he Duties of Man.
ADDRESSED TO WORKINGMEN
Joseph Mazzini
l.L'NK & WAGNALLS COMPANY
NKW VOKK .:. [-ONDON
Pric«, 25 Cents
al
he Duties of Manj
ADDRESSED TO WORKINGMEN
Joseph Mazzini
EUNK & WAONALLS CoMPAN
New Vork .:. London
WHAT SOCIALISM IS AND IS NOT
The History of Social-
ism in the United States
By MORRIS HILLQUIT
A complete account of the origin, developmcnl,
and present status of socialistic movements through-
out the United States, indispensable to an intelligent
sppreciaiioQ of socialism as it exists In this country.
IMPORTANT FEATURES OF THE ffORK
The riiii pUMo
[iLo Straggle, HompMeiid
he, Oaur iTAlene BHlUe. [be
rsaa, Clelh.jjr Fagii. p:jn, Na ; ly Mail, $r.6y.
FUNK & WAGNALLS COMPANY, Publishers
NEW YORK *NU LONDON
^ C\. ''. ''■ <
V
AN ESSAY ON
THE DUTIES OF MAN
ADDRESSED TO WORKINGMEN
WKI T T JBW m 1844 AND 18S8
BY
JOSEPH MAZZINI
BSPBINTKD BT PXBMISSIOir OV
MRS. EMILIE ASHURST VENTURI
Editor of " The Life and WrfUnga of Joseph Mazzini"
FRINTBD IN THE UNITED STATES
tSTrto Yorft
rUNK & WAGNALLS COMPANY
New York and London
1892
;
/ ■<
\'\
CONTENTS.
Chapter I. ,agbs.
introduction — 1844 5-20
Chapter II.
God 21-32
Chapter III.
The Law 33-43
Chapter IV.
Duties Towards Humanity 44-56
Chapter V.
Duties Towards your Country — 1858 S7~^3
Chapter VI.
Duties Towards the Family 64-71
Chapter VII.
Duties Towards Yourselves 72-83
Chapter VIII.
Liberty 84-92
:V CONTENTS.
«
Chapter IX. p^
Education 93-
Ch AFTER X.
Association. Progress 102-
Chapter XL
The Economical Question iio-
Chapter XII.
Conclusion 137-
>«^
AN ESSAY
ON
THE DUTIES OF MAN.
ADDRESSED TO WORKINGMEN.
CHAPTER I.
INTRODUCTION.
1844.
I INTEND to speak to you of your duties. I intend
to speak to you, according to the dictates of my heart,
of the holiest things we know; to speak to you of
God, of Humanity, of the Fatherland, and the Family.
Listen to me in love, as I shall speak to you in
love. My words are words of conviction, matured
by long years of study, of experience, and of sorrow.
The duties which I point out to you I have striven,
and shall strive while I live, to fulfill so far as I have
the power. I may err, but my error is not of the
heart. I may deceive myself, but I will not deceive
you. Listen to me, then, fraternally; judge freely
among yourselves whether I speak truth or error.
If it seems to you I speak error, leave me; but follow
me and act according to my teachings, if you believe
me the apostle of truth. To err is misfortune, and
deserving of commiseration; but to know the truth
s^nd fail to regulate our actions according to its teach-
8 THE DUTIES OF MAN.
especially, where I write,* the price of the necessaries
of life has continually augmented, the wages of work-
ingmen in many branches of industry have progres-
sively diminished, while the population has increased.
In almost all countries the condition of the working-
man has become more uncertain, more precarious,
while those crises which condemn thousands of work-
ingmen to a certain period of inertia have become
more frequent.
The annual increase of emigration from country to
country, and from Europe to other parts of the world,
and the ever-increasing number of benevolent insti-
tutions, of poor's rates, and other precautions against
mendicity, suffice to prove this. They indicate that
public attention is continually being attracted to the
sufferings of the people; but their inefficiency visibly
to diminish those sufferings demonstrates an equally
progressive augmentation of the misery of the classes
in whose behalf they endeavour to provide.
And nevertheless in these last fifty years the sources
of social wealth and the mass of material means of
happiness have been continually on the increase.
Commerce, surmounting those frequent crises which
are inevitable in the absolute absence of all organiza-
tion, has achieved an increase of power and activity,
and a wider sphere of operation. Communication
has almost everywhere been rendered rapid and
secure, and hence the price of produce has decreased
in proportion to the diminished cost of transport.
On the other hand, the idea that there are nghts in-
* England. It must be borne in mind that this and the three
succeeding chapters were written in 1844.
INTRODUCTION. 9
herent to human nature is now generally admitted
and accepted — hypocritically and in words at least —
even by those who seek to withhold those rights.
Why, then, has not the condition of the people im-
proved? Why has the consumption of produce, instead
of being equally distributed among all the Members of
European Society, become concentrated in the hands
of a few, of a class forming a new aristocracy? Why
has the fresh impulse given to industry and com-
merce resulted, not in the well-being of the many,
but in the luxury of a few?
The answer ic clear to those who look closely into
things. Men are the creatures of education, and
their actions are but the consequence of the principle
of education given to them. The promoters of revo-
lutions and political transformations have hitherto
founded them all on one idea, the idea of the rights
pertaining to the individual. Those revolutions
achieved Liberty — individual liberty, liberty of edu-
cation, liberty of belief, liberty of commerce, liberty
in all things and for all men.
But of what use were rights when acquired by
men who had not the means of exercising them? Of
what use was mere liberty of education to men who
liad neither time nor means to profit by it? Of what
use was mere liberty of commerce to those who pos-
sessed neither merchandise, capital, nor credit?
In all the countries wherein these principles were
proclaimed. Society was composed of the small num-
ber of individuals who were possessors of the land,
of capital, and of credit, and of the vast multitude
who possessed nothing but the labour of their hands,
and were compelled to sell that labour to the first
12 THE DUTIES OF MAN.
vidual rights are most secure? What is Society but
an assemblage of men who have agreed to bring the
power of the many in support of the rights of each ?
And you, who for fifty years have been preaching
to the individual that Society is constituted for the pur-
pose of securing to him the exercise of his rights, how can
you ask him to sacrifice them all in favour of that
Society, and submit, if need be, to ceaseless effort, to
imprisonment or exile, for the sake of improving it?
After having taught him by every means in your
power that the end and aim of life is happiness, how
can you expect him to sacrifice both happiness and
life itself to free his country from foreign oppression,
or to produce some amelioration in the condition of a
class to which he does not belong? After you have
preached to him for years in the name of material
interest, can you pretend that he shall see wealth and
power within his own reach and not stretch forth his
hand to grasp them, even though to the injury of his
fellow-men?
«♦♦♦♦♦
Who shall persuade the man, believing solely in
the theory of rights, that he is bound to strive for
the common good, and occupy himself in the develop-
ment of the social idea? Suppose he should rebel;
suppose he should feel himself strong enough to say
to you: " I break the social bond; my tendencies and
my faculties invite me elsewhere; I have a sacred, an
inviolable right to develop those tendencies and fac-
ulties, and I choose to be at war with the rest;" what
answer can vmi make him within the limits of the
Doctrine of Rights? What right have you, merely as
a majority, to compel his obedience to laws which dp
INTRODUCTION. I3
not accord with his individual desires and aspirations?
What right have you to punish him should he violate
those laws?
The Rights of each individual are equal; the mere
fact of living together in Society does not create a
single one. Society has greater power, not greater
rights, than the individual. How, then, will you
prove to the individual that he is bound to confound
his will in the will of his brothers, whether of coun-
try or of humanity?
By means of the prison or the executioner?
Every Society that has existed hitherto has em-
ployed these means.
But this is a state of war, and we need peace; this
is tyrannical repression, and we need Education.
EDUCATION, I have said, and my whole doctrine ^
is included and summed up in this grand word. The
vital question in agitation at the present day is a
question of Education. We do not seek to establish
a new order of things through violence. Any order
of things established through violence, even though
itself superior to the old, is still a tyranny. What we
have to do is to propose, for the approval of the
nation, an order of things which we believe to be
superior to that now existing, and to educate men by
every possible means to develop it and act in accord-
ance with it.
The theory of Rights may suffice to arouse men
to overthrow the obstacles placed in their path by
tyranny, but it is impotent where the object in view
is to create a noble and powerful harmony between
the various elements of which the nation is composed.
With the theory of happiness as the primary aim of
l6 THE DUTIES OF MAN.
of your own old age: how can you acquire habits ol
economy ? Many among you are compelled by pov-
erty to withdraw your children — I will not say from
the instruction, for what educational instruction can
the poor wife of a workingman bestow upon her
children? — but from the mother's watchfulness and
love, in order that they may gain a few pence in the
unwholesome and injurious labour of manufactories:
how can children so circumstanced be developed
under the softening influence of family affection ?
You have no rights of citizenship, no participation
either of election or vote, in those laws which are to
direct your actions and govern your life: how can
you feel the sentiment of citizenship, zeal for the
welfare of the State, or sincere affection for its laws ?
Your poverty frequently involves the impossibility
of your obtaining justice like the other classes: how
are you to learn to love and respect justice ? Society
treats you without a shadow of sympathy: how are
you to learn sympathy with Society ?
It is therefore needful that your material condition
should be improved, in order that you may morally
progress. It is necessary that you should labour less,
so that you may consecrate some hours every day to
your soul's improvement. It is neeeful that you
should receive such remuneration for your labour as
may enable you to accumulate a sufficient saving to
tranquillize your minds as to your future. And, above
all, it is necessary to purify your souls from all
reaction, from all sentiment of vengeance, from every
thought of injustice, even towards those who have
been unjust towards you. You are bound, therefore,
to strive for all these ameliorations in your condition
INTRODUCTION. 1 7
and you will obtain them; but you must seek them
as a means, not as an end; seek them from a sense of
duty, and not merely as a right; seek them in order
that you may become more virtuous, not in order
that you may be materially happy.
If not so, where would be the difference between
you and those by whom you have been oppressed ?
They oppressed you precisely because they only
sought happiness, enjoyment, and power.
Improve yourselves ! Let this be the aim of yourv
life. It is only by improving yourselves, by becom-
ing more virtuous, that you can render your position
lastingly less unhappy. Petty tyrants would arise
among yourselves by thousands, so long as you should
merely strive to advance in tlie name of material
interests or a special social organization. A change
of social organization is of little moment while you
yourselves remain with your present passions and
selfishness. Social organizations are like certain
plants which yield either poison or medicine according
to the mode in which they are administered. Good
men can work good even out of an evil organization,
and evil men can work evil out of good organizations.
No doubt it is also necessary to improve the classes
who now oppress you, but you will never succeed in
doing this unless you begin by improving yourselves.
When, therefore, you hear those who preach the
necessity of a social transformation, declare that they
can accomplish it solely by invoking your rights, be
grateful to them for their good intentions, but be dis-
trustful of their success. The sufferings of the poor
are partially known to the wealthier classes ; known
but not felt. In the general indifference resulting
l8 THE DUTIES OF MAN.
from the absence of a common faith; in the selfish-
ness which is the inevitable result of so many years
spent preaching material happiness, those who do
not suffer themselves have, little by little, become
accustomed to regard the sufferings of others as a
sorrowful necessity of social organization, or to leave
the remedy to generations to come. The difficulty
lies, not so much in convincing them, as in rousing
them from their inertia, and inducing them, when
once convinced, to act; to associate together, and to
fraternize with you, in order to create such a social
organization as shall put an end — as far as human
possibilities allow — to your sufferings and their own
fears.
Now, to do this is the work of Faith; of faith in
the mission which God has given to his human creat-
ure here on earth; in the responsibility which weighs
upon all those who fail to fulfill that mission; and in
the Duty imposed upon all, of continual endeavour
and sacrifice in the cause of truth.
Any conceivable doctrine of Right and material
happiness can only lead you to attempts which, so
long as you remain isolated and rely solely on your
own strength, can never succeed; and which can but
result in that worst of crimes, a civil war between
class and class.
Workingmen! Brothers! When Christ came, and
changed the face of the world, he spoke not of rights
to the rich, who needed not to achieve them; nor to
the poor, who would doubtless have abused them in
imitation of the rich; he spoke not of utility nor of
interest to a people whom interest and utility had
corrupted; he spoke of Duty, he spoke of Love, of
INTRODUCTION. I9
Sacrifice, and of Faith ; and he said that they should be
first among all who had contributed most by their labour
to the good of all.
And the words of Christ, breathed in the ear of a
society in which all true life was extinct, recalled it
to existence, conquered the millions, conquered the
world, and caused the education of the human race
to ascend one degree on the scale of progress.
Workingmen! We live in an epoch similar to that
of Christ. We live in the midst of a society as cor-
rupt as that of the Roman Empire, feeling in our
inmost soul the need of reanimating and transform-
ing it, and of uniting all its various members in one
sole faith, beneath one sole law, in one sole aim — the
free and progressive development of all the faculties
of which God has given the germ to his creatures.
We seek the Kingdom of God on earth as it is in
Heaven^ or rather, that earth may become a prepara-
tion for Heaven, and society an endeavour after the
progressive realization of the Divine Idea.
But Christ's every act was the visible representa-
tion of the Faith he preached; and around him stood
apostles who incarnated in their actions the faith they
had accepted. Be you such, and you will conquer.
Preach duty to the classes above you, and fulfill, as
far as in you lies, your own. Preach virtue, sacrifice
and love; and be yourselves virtuous, loving, and
ready for self-sacrifice. Speak your thoughts boldly,
and make known your wants courageously; but with-
out anger, without reaction, and without threats.
The strongest menace, if indeed there be those for
whom threats are necessary, will be the firmness, not
the irritation, of your speech.
26 THE DUTIES OF MAN.
While you propagate amongst your brothers the idea
of a better future, which will secure to them educa*
tion, work, its fitting remuneration, arid the con»
science and mission of Men, strive also to instruct and
improve yourselves, and to educate yourselves to the
full knowledge and practice of your duties.
At present this is a labour rendered impossible to
the masses in many parts of England. No plan of
popular education can be realized alone ; a change
both in the political and material condition of the
people is also needed; and they who imagine that an
educational transformation may be accomplished
alone, deceive themselves.
A few among you, once imbued with the true prin-
ciples on which the moral, social, and political educa-
tion of a people depend, will suffice to spread them
among the millions, as a guide on their way, to pro-
tect them from the sophistries and false doctrines by
which it will be sought to lead them astray.
CHAPTER 11.
GOD.
The source of your duties is in God. The defini-
tion of your duties is found in the Law. The pro-
gressive discovery and application of this law is the
mission of Humanity.
God exists. I am not bound to prove this to you,
nor shall I endeavour to do so. To me the attempt
would seem blasphemous, as the denial appears mad-
ness.
God exists, because we exist. God lives in our
conscience, in the conscience of Humanity. Our
conscience invokes Him in our most solemn moments
of grief or joy. Humanity has been able to trans-
form, to disfigure, never to suppress, His holy name.
The Universe bears witness to Him in the order, har-
mony, and intelligence of its movements and its laws.
There are, I hope, no atheists among you. Were
there any, they would deserve pity rather than male-
diction. He who can deny God either in the face of
a starlight night, or when standing beside the tomb
of those dearest to him, or in the presence of mar«
tyrdom, is either greatly unhappy, or greatly guilty*
The first atheist was surely one who had concealed
some crime from his fellow-men, and who sought by
denying God to free himself from the sole witness
from whom concealment was impossible, and thus.
22 THE DUTIES OF MAN.
to Stifle the remorse by which he was tormented. Or
perhaps the first atheist was a tyrant, who, having
destroyed one-half of the soul of his brethren by
depriving them of liberty, endeavoured to substitute
the worship of brute force for faith in duty and eter-
nal right.
After these, from age to age, there came men, here
and there, who taught atheism from philosophical
aberration ; but they were few and ashamed. After
these, in days not far removed from our own, came
many who, from reaction against a false and absurd
idea of God created by some tyranny or caste, denied
God Himself ; but it was only for an instant — so great
was the need they felt of Divinity that even they
worshipped a Goddess of Reason and Goddess of
Nature.
At the present day there are many men who abhor
all religion because they see the corruption of the
actual creeds, and have no conception of the purity
of the Religion of the Future ; but none of these ven-
ture to declare themselves atheists. There do indeed
exist priests who prostitute the name of God to the
calculations of a venal self-interest, and tyrants who
falsify His name by invoking it in support of their
tyranny ; but because the light of the sun is often ob-
scured by impure vapours, shall we deny the sun him-
self, and the vivifying influenceof his rays throughout
the universe ? Because the liberty of the wicked
sometimes produces anarchy, shall we curse the name
of liberty itself ?
The undying light of faith in God pierces through
all the imposture and corruption wherewith men have
darkened His name. Imposture and corruption pass
1
GOD. 23
away ; tyrannies pass away ; but God remains, as the
people, the image of God on earth, remains. Even
as the people passes through slavery, poverty, and
suffering, to achieve self-consciousness, power, and
emancipation, step by step, so does the holy name of
God arise above the ruins of corrupt creeds, to shine
forth surrounded by a purer, more intense, and more
rational form of worship.
I do not therefore speak to you of God in order to
demonstrate to you His existence, or to tell you that
you are bound to worship Him ; you do worship Him
whensoever you deeply /<f^/ your own life^ and that of
the fellow-beings by whom you are surrounded ; but
in order to tell you how to worship Him, and to ad-
monish you of an error that predominates in the
classes by whom you are governed, and through their
example influences too many of yourselves, an error
as grave and fatal as atheism itself.
This error is the separation, more or less apparent,
of God from His work, from the earth upon which
you are called to fulfill one period of your existence.
On the one side there are men who tell you: "// is
very true that God exists y but the only thing you can do is
to confess His existence ^ and adore Him, None can com-
prehend or declare the relation between God and your con-
science. Reflect upon all this as much as you please, but
neither propound your own belief to your fellow-men^ nor
seek to apply it to the ajfairs of this earth.
" Politics are one things Religion another. Do not con-
found them together. Leave all heavenly things to the
spiritual authorities, whatever they may be, reserving to
yourself the right of refusing them your belief if they
appear to you to betray their mission. Let each man
24 THE DUTIES OF MAN.
believe in his own way j the only thing about which you are
bound to concern yourselves in common are the things of
this world. Materialists^ or Spiritualists ^ whichsoever you
bCy do you believe in the liberty and equality of mankind?
do you desire the well-being of the majority ? do you believe
in universal suffrage ? Unite together to obtain these
things ; in order to obtain these, you will have no occasion
to come to a common understanding about heavenly things.**
On the other side, you have men who say to you,
" God exists, but He is too great, too superior to all created
things, for you to hope to approach Him through any
human work. The earth is of clay. Life is but a day.
Withdraw yourselves from the first as far as possible and
do not value the other above its worth. What are all
earthly interests in comparison with the immortal life of
your soul ? Think of this ! Fix your eyes on Heaven.
What matters it how you live here below ? You are doomed
to die, and God will judge you according to the thoughts
you have given, not to earth, but to Him. Are you unhappy ?
Bless the God who has sent you sorrows. Terrestrial
existence is but a period of trial, the earth but a land of
exile. Despise it, and raise yourselves above it. In the
midst of sorrows, poverty, or slavery, you can still turn to
God and sanctify yourselves in adoration of Him, in
prayer, and in faith in a future that will largely recom-
pense you for having despised every worldly thing**
Of those who speak to you thus, the first do not
lot^e God, the second do not kno^v Him.
Say to the first that man is one. You cannot divide
him in half, and so contrive that he shall agree with
you in those principles which regulate the origin of
society while he differs with you as regards his own
origin, destiny, and law of life here below. The
GOD. 25
world is governed by Religions. When the Indians
really believed that some of them were born from the
head, others from the arms, and others from the feet
of Brahma, their Divinity, they organized their society
by distributing mankind into castes; assigning to one
caste an inheritance of intellectual labour, to another
of military, and to others of servile duties; and thus
condemned themselves to an immobility that still
endures, and that will endure so long as belief in that
religious principle shall last.
When the Christians declared to the world that all
men were the sons of God, and brethren in His name,
all the doctrines of the legislators and philosophers
of antiquity, tending to establish the existence of two
races of men, availed not to prevent the abolition of
slavery, and a consequent radical reorganization of
Society.
For every advance in religious belief we can point
to a corresponding social advance in the history of
Humanity, while the only result you can show as a
consequence of your doctrine of indifference in mat-
ters of religion is anarchy. You have been able to
destroy; never to build up. Disprove this, if you can.
By dint of exaggerating one of the principles
of Protestantism — a principle which Protestantism it-
self now feels the necessity of abandoning — by dint of
deducing all your ideas from the sole principle of the
independence of the individual, you have achieved —
what?
In commerce, you have achieved anarchy — that is
to say, the oppression of the weak. In politics you
have achieved liberty — that is to say, the derision of
the weak, who have neither time, nor means, nor in-
26 THE DUTIES OF MAN.
struction sufficient to enable them to exercise their
rightSk In morals you have achieved selfishness —
that is to say, the isolation and ruin of the weak, who
cannot raise themselves alone.
But what we seek is association.
How shall we realize this securely, unless among
brothers, believing in the same ruling principle, united
in the same faith, and bearing witness by the same
name?
What we seek is education.
How shall we give or receive it, unless in virtue of
a principle that sums up and expresses our common
belief as to the origin, the aim, and the law of the life
of mankind upon earth?
We seek a common education.
How shall we give or receive it without belief in a
common faith and a common duty?
And whence can we deduce a common duty, if not
from the idea we form of God and our relation to
Him?
Doubtless universal suffrage is an excellent thing.
It is the only legal means by which a people may
govern itself without risk of continual violent crises.
Universal suffrage in a country governed by a com-
mon faith is the expression of the national will; but
in a country deprived of a common belief, what can
it be but the mere expression of the interests of those
numerically the stronger, to the oppression of all the
rest?
All the political reforms achieved in countries
either irreligious or indifferent to religion have lasted
as long as interest allowed — no longer. On this
point the experience of political movements in Europe
GOD. «7
during the last fifty years has taught us lessons
enough.
To those who speak to you of heaven, and seek to
separate it from earth, you will say that heaven and
earth are one, even as the way and the goal are one.
Tell us not that the earth is of clay. The earth is of
God. God created it as the medium through which
we may ascend to Him. The earth is not a mere
sojourn of temptation or of expiation ; it is the
appointed dwelling-place wherein we are bound
to work out our own improvement and development
and advance towards a higher stage of existence. God
created us not to contemplate, but to act. He created
us in His own image, and He is Thought and Actiofiy
or ratker, in Him there is no Thought which is not
simultaneous Action.
You tell us to despise all worldly things, to trample
under foot our terrestrial life, in order to concern
ourselves solely with the Celestial; but what is our
terrestrial life save a prelude to the Celestial — a step
towards it? See you not that while sanctifying the
last step of the ladder by which we must all ascend,
by thus declaring the first accursed you arrest us on
the way?
The life of a soul is sacred in every stage of its
existence; as sacred in the earthly stage as in those
which are to follow. Each stage must be made a
preparation for the next; every temporary advance
must aid the gradual ascending progress of that im-
mortal life breathed into us all by God Himself, as
well as the progress of the great Entity — Humanity
— which is developed through the labour of each and
every individual.
28 THE DUTIES OF MAN.
God has placed you here upon this earth. He has
surrounded you with myriads of fellow-beings whose
minds receive aliment from your own, whose devel-
opment progresses simultaneously with your own,
whose life is fecundated by your own. In order to
preserve you from the dangers, of isolation He has
given you desires which you are incapable of satis-
fying alone, and those dominating social instincts
which distinguish you from the brute creation, in
which they are dormant. He has spread around you
a material world, magnificent in beauty and pregnant
with life; a life — be it ever remembered — which,
though it reveal itself by divine impulse, yet every-
where awaits your labour, and modifies its manifes-
tations through you, increasing in power and vigour
in proportion to your increased activity.
God has given you certain sympathies which are
inextinguishable. Such are pity for tliose that mourn,
and joy for those that rejoice; anger against those
who oppress their fellow-creatures; a ceaseless yearn-
ing after truth; admiration for the genius that dis-
covers a new portion or form of truth; enthusiasm
for those who reduce it to beneficial action upon man-
kind; and religious veneration for those, who, failing
to achieve its triumph, yet bear witness to it with
their blood, and die in martyrdom : and you deny
and reject all the indications of your mission which
God has thus clustered around you, when you cry
anathema on the work of His hand, and call upon us
to concentrate all our faculties on a work of mere
inward purification, necessarily imperfect, nay impos-
sible, if sought alone.
Does not God punish those who strive to do this ?
G0&. i$
ts not the slave degraded ? Is not one-half of the
soul of the poor day-labourer (doomed to consume
the light divine in a series of physical acts unrelieved
by a gleam of education) buried beneath its animal
appetites, in those blind instincts which you name
material ? Do you find more religious faith in the
poor Russian serf than in the Pole fighting the battle
of country and liberty? Do you find more fervent
love. of God in the degraded subject of a pope or
despotic king than in the Lombard republicans of
the twelfth, or Florentine republicans of the four-
teenth, century ?
" Where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is Liberty,"
has been declared by one of the most powerful
Apostles the world has known, arid the religion he
preached decreed the abolition of slavery. Who that
crouches at the foot of the creature can rightly know
and worship the Creator ?
Yours is not a Religion. It is a sect of men who
have forgotten their origin, forgotten the battles which
their fathers fought against a corrupt society and
the victories they gained in transforming the world
which you despise, O men of contemplation !
The first real, earnest religious Faith that shall
arise upon the ruins of the old worn-out creeds will
transform the whole of our actual social organization,
because every strong and earnest faith tends to apply
itself to every branch of human activity; because in
every epoch of its existence the earth has ever tend-
ed to conform itself to the Heaven in which it then
believed; and because the whole history of Humanity
is but the repetition — in form and degree varying ac-
cording to the diversity of the times — of the words
30 THE DUTIES OF MAN.
of the Dominical Christian Prayer: Thy Kingdom
Come on Earth as it is in Heaven.
" Thy Kingdom come on earth as it is in heaven."
Let these words — better understood and better ap-
plied than in the past — be the utterance of your faith,
your prayer, O my brothers! Repeat them, and strive
to fulfill them. No matter if others seek to persuade
you to passive resignation and indifference to earthly
things, if they preach submission to every temporal
authority, however unjust, by quoting to you — with-
out comprehending them — the words, "Render unto
Caesar the things that are Caesar's, and unto God the
things that are God's."
Nothing is of Caesar unless it be such in conformity
to the law of God. Caesar — that is to say, the tem-
poral power of civil government — is but the adminis-
trator and executive, as far as lies in its power, of the
design of the Almighty. Whensoever it is false to its
mission and trust, it is, I do not say your rights but
your duty^ to change it.
For what purpose are you placed here, if it be not
to work out the providential design in your own
sphere and according to your means? To what pur-
pose do you profess to believe in that Unity of the
human race which is the necessary consequence
of the Unity of God, if you do not strive to
verify it by destroying the arbitrary divisions and
enmities that still separate the different tribes of
Humanity?
What avails it to believe in human liberty — the basis
of human responsibility — if you do not labour to over-
throw all the obstacles that impede th^e first and
destroy the second ? Why do we talk of fraternity,
GOD. 31
while we allow any of our brothers to be trampled
on, degraded, or despised ?
The earth is our workshop. We may not curse it;
we are bound to sanctify it.
The material forces that surround us are our instru-
ments of labour. We may not reject them; we are
bound to direct them for good. But this we cannot
do alone, without God.
I have spokoyi to you of duties; I have told you
that the consciousness of your rights will never suffice
you as a permanent guide on the path towards per-
fection; it will not even suffice to procure for you the
continuous progressive improvement in your condi-
tion which you seek and desire.
Now, apart from God, whence can you derive duty ?
Without God, whatsoever system you attempt to lean
upon, you will find it has no other foundation or basis
than Force — blind, tyrannical, brute force.
There is no escape from this.
Either the development of human things depends
upon a Providential Law, which we are all bound to
seek to discover and apply, or it is left to chance, to
passing circumstance, and to that man who contrives
best to turn things to account.
We must either obey God or serve man; whether
one man or many, matters little.
If there be not a governing Mind, supreme over
every human mind, what shall preserve us from the
dominion of our fellow-men whenever chey are
stronger than ourselves ?
If there be not one inviolable Law, uncreated by
man, what rule have we by which to judge whether a
given act be just or unjust ?
32 THE DtTTTES OF MAN.
In the name pf whom, or of what, shall we protest
against inequality and oppression ?
Without God there is no other rule than that of
Fact^ the accomplished fact, before which the mate-
rialist ever bows his head, whether its name be Bona-
parte or Revolution.
How can we expect men to sacrifice themselves, or
to suffer martyrdom in the name of our individual
opinion ? •
Can we transform theory into practice, abstract
principle into action, on the strength of interests
alone ?
Be not deceived. So long as we endeavour to teach
sacrifice as individuals, or on whatever theory our
mere individual intellect may suggest, we may find
adherents in words, never in act. That cry only,
which has resounded in all great and noble revolu-
tions, the " God wills it^ God wills it,* of the Crusad-
ers, will have power to rouse the inert to action, to
give courage to the timid, the enthusiasm of sacrifice
to the calculating, and faith to those who distrust and
reject all mere human ideas.
Prove to mankind that the work of progressive devel-
opment to which you would call them is a part of the
design of God, and none will rebel. Prove to them
that the earthly duties to be fulfilled here below are
an essential portion of their immortal life, and all the
calculations of the present will vanish before the
grandeur of the future.
Without God you may compel, but not persuade;
you may become tyrants in your turn, you cannot be
Educators or Apostles.
CHAPTER III.
THE LAW.
You live. Therefore you have a law of life. There
is no life without its law. Whatever thing exists,
exists in a certain method, according to certain con-
ditions, and is governed by a certain law.
The mineral world is governed by a law of aggre-
gation; the vegetable world by a law of development;
the stars are ruled by a law of motion.
Your life is governed by a lav/ higher and nobler
than these, even as you are superior to all other
created earthly things. To develop yourselves, and
act and live according to your law, is your first, or
rather your sole, duty.
God gave you life; God therefore gave you the
law. God is the sole Law-giver to the human race.
His law is the sole law you are bound to obey.
Human laws are only good and valid in so far as they
conform to, explain, and apply the law of God. They
are evil whensoever they contrast with or oppose it,
and it is then not only your right but your duty to
disobey and abolish them.
He who shall best explain the law of God, and best
apply it to human things, is your legitimate ruler.
Love him and follow him. But you have not, and
cannot have, any Master save God himself. To ac-
cept any other is to be unfaithful and rebellious to
Him.
i
34 THE DUTIES OF MAN.
The foundation of all morality, therefore, the regu-
lation of all your acts and duties, and the measure
of your responsibility, is to be found in the knowl-
edge of your law of life, of the law of God. It is also
your defence against the unjust laws which the
tyranny of one man, or many men, may seek to im-
pose upon you.
Unless you know this law, you may not pretend to
the name or the rights of men All rights have their
origin in a law, and while you are unable to invoke
this law, you may be tyrants or slaves — tyrants if you
are strong, the slaves of the stronger if you are weak
— but naught else.
In order to be meuy you must know the law which
distinguishes human nature from that of the animal,
vegetable, and mineral kingdoms, and to it you must
conform your action. Now, how are you to know
this law?
This is the question which humanity has ever ad-
dressed to those who have pronounced the word
Duty, and the answers are various even yet.
Some have replied by pointing to a code, or book,
saying: " The whole law of morals is comprised in this
book,'* Others have said: ^^ Let every man interrogate
his own conscience; he will find the definition of good and
evil there" Others again, rejecting the judgment of
the individual, invoke the universal judgment, and
declare: " Whenever humanity is agreed in a beliefs thai
belief is the truth**
Each and all of these are in error. And facts, un-
answerable in the history of the human race, have
proved the impotence of all these answers.
Those who declare that the whole moral law is con-
THE LAW. 35
tained in a book, or uttered by one man, forget that
there is no single code of morals which Humanity
has not abandoned, after an acceptance arid belief of
some centuries, in order to seek after and diffuse
another more advanced than it; nor is tliere any
special reason for supposing that Humanity will alter
its course now.
It will be sufficient to remind those who declare
the conscience of the individual to be an adequate
criterion of the just and true, that no Religion, how-
ever holy, has existed without heretics, dissenters
who dissented from conviction, and were ready to
endure martyrdom for their conscience sake. The
Protestant world is at the present day divided and
subdivided into a thousand sects, all founded on the
right of individual conscience, all eager to make war
on one another, and perpetuating that anarchy of
beliefs which is the sole true cause of the social and
political disturbances that torment the peoples of
Europe. And on the other hand, to those who reject
the testimony of individual conscience, and invoke
the consent of Humanity in their faith, suffice it to
say that all the great ideas that have contributed to
the progress of Humanity hitherto were, at their
commencement, in opposition to the belief then ac
cepted by Humanity, and were preached by individ
ua/s whom Humanity derided, persecuted, and crn
cified.
Each of these rules, then, is insufficient in order to
obtain a knowledge of the law of God, of Truth.
Yet, nevertheless, individual conscience is sacred,
and the common consent of Humanity is sacred; and
he who refuses to interrogate either of these deprives
36 THE DUTIES OF MAN.
himself of one essential means of reaching truth.
The common error hitherto has been the endeavour
to reach truth by the help of one of these tests alone;
an error fatal and decisive in its consequences, be-
cause it is impossible to elevate individual conscience
^ as the sole judge of truth without falling into anarchy;
and it is impossible to appeal, at a given moment,
to the general consent of Humanity without crush-
ing human liberty, and producing tyranny. Thus —
and I quote these examples in order to show how,
far more than is generally supposed, the entire social
edifice is founded upon these primary bases — thus
some men have fallen into the error of organizing soci-
ety solely with respect to the rights of the individ-
ual, wholly forgetful of the educational mission of soci-
ety; while others have based their organization solely
on the rights of society, sacrificing the free action
and liberty of the individual. *
France, after her great revolution, and (still more
markedly) England, has taught us that the first sys-
tem results in inequality and the oppression of the
many. Communism, were it ever elevated into a
JF'acfy would teach us how the second condemns soci-
ety to petrifaction, by destroying alike all motive and
all opportunity of progress.
Thus some, in consideration of the pretended
fights of the individual, have organized, or rather
disorganized, society by founding it upon the sole
» I speak, of course, of those countries governed by a constitu-
tional monarchy, and in which a certain organization of society is
attempted. In countries despotically governed, there is no soci-
ety; individual and social rights being equally sacrificed.
THE LAW. 37
basis of unlimited freedom of competition; while
others, merely regarding social unity, would give the /
government the monopoly of all the productive
forces of the State.
The first of these conceptions has resulted in all
the evils of anarchy. The second would result in
immobility and all the evils of tyranny.
God has given you both the consent of your fellow-
men and your own conscience, even as two wings
wherewith to elevate yourselves towards Him. Why
persist in cutting off one of them ? Wherefore either
isolate yourselves from, or absorb yourselves in, the
world ? Why seek to stifle either the voice of the
individual, or of the human race? Both are sacred.
God speaks through each. Whensoever they agree^
whensoever the cry of your own conscience is ratified
by the consent of Humanity, God is there. Then
you are certain of having found the truth, for the one
is the verification of the other.
If your duties were merely negative, if they merely
consisted in not doing evil, in not injuring your
brother-men, perhaps, even in the stage of develop-
ment which the least educated among you have
reached, the voice of conscience might suffice you for
a guide. You are born with a tendency towards good,
and every time you act directly contrary to the moral
law, every time you commit what mankind has
agreed to name sin, there is a something within you
that condemns you, a cry of reproval which you may
conceal from others, but cannot from yourselves.
But your most important duties are positive. It is
not enough not to do. You are bound to act. It is
not enough to limit yourselves to not acting against
N
38 THE DUTIES OF MAN.
the Law : you are bound to act according to the Law.
It is not enough not to do harm to your brethren :
you are bound to do good to them. Hitherto
morality has too often been presented to mankind in
a form rather negative than affirmative. The inter-
preters of the law have said to us: "Thou shalt not
kill; thou shalt not steal." Few or none have taught
us the active duties of man, how he may be useful to
his fellow-creatures and further the design of God
in the creation. Yet this is the primary aim in
morals, and no individual can reach that aim by the
light of conscience alone.
Individual conscience speaks in proportion to the
education, tendencies, habits, and passions of the
individual. The conscience of the Iroquois speaks a
different language to that of the enlightened Euro-
pean of the nineteenth century. The conscience of
the freeman suggests duties which the conscience of
the slave does not even imagine. Ask the poor Lom-
bard or Neapolitan peasant, whose only teacher of
morality has been a bad priest, or to whom — even if
he know how to read — the Austrian catechism is the
sole book allowed, he will perhaps tell you that his
sole duties are to work hard for any remuneration he
can obtain in order to maintain his family, to sub-
mit without examination to the laws of the State,
whatsoever they may be, and to do no wrong to
others. Should you say to him: ^^ But you injure your
brother-men by accepting a remuneration below the lvalue
of your labor^ and you sin against God and your own soul
by obeying laavs which are unjust^'' he will answer you
with the fixed gaze of one who understands you not.
Interrogate tlie Italian worktpatii to whom n^orc
THE LAW. 39
fortunate circumstances and contact with men of
greater intellectual enlightenment have made known
a portion of the truth, he will tell you that his
country is enslaved, that his brothers are unjustly
:ondemned to pass their days in moral and material
» ant, and that he feels it his duty to protest as far
.s he can against the injustice.
Whence this great difference between the dictates
of the conscience of two individuals at the same
epoch in the same country ? Wherefore, among ten
individuals, belonging substantially to the same
religious belief — that which decrees the development
and progress of the human race — do we find ten dif-
ferent opinions as to the mode of reducing that
belief to action — that is to say, as to their duties 1
Evidently, the voice of individual conscience does
not suffice at all times, without any other guide, to
make known to us the law. Conscience alone may
teach us that a law exists ; it cannot teach us the
duties thence derived. Thus it is thaf martyrdom
has never been extinguished amongst mankind, how-
ever great the predominance of selfishness ; but how
many martyrs have sacrificed their existence for
imaginary duties, or for errors patent to all of us at
the present day !
Conscience, therefore, has need of a guide, of a
torch to illumine the darkness by which it is sur-
rounded, of a rule by which to direct and verify its
instincts.
This rule is the Intellect of Humanity,
God has given intellect to each of you in order that
you may educate it to know His Law. At the present
day you are deprived by poverty, and the inveterate
4© THE DUTIES OF MAN.
error of ages, of the possibility of full education, and,
f therefore, the obstacles to education are the first you
J have to overcome. But even were all these obstacles
removed, the intellect of the individual man would
still be insufficient to acquire a knowledge of the law
of God, unless aided and supported by the intellect
of Humanity. Your life is brief, your individual fac-
ulties weak and uncertain; they need alike verification
and support. Now God has placed beside you a Be-
ing whose life is continuous, whose faculties are the
results and sum of all the individual faculties that
have existed for perhaps four hundred ages; a Being
who, in the midst of the errors and crimes of individ-
uals, yet ever advances in wisdom and morality; a
Being in whose development and progress God has
inscribed, and from epoch to epoch does still inscribe,
a line of His law.
This Being is Humanity.
A thinker of the past century has described Human-
ity as A man who lives and learns forever. Individuals
die, but the amount of truth they have thought, and
the sum of good they have done, dies not with them.
The men who pass over their graves reap the benefit
thereof, and Humanity garners it up.
Each of us is born to-day in an atmosphere of ideas
and beliefs which has been elaborated by all anterior
Humanity, and each of us brings with him (even if
unconsciously) an element, more or less important, of
tlie life of Humanity to come. The education of
Humanity is built up like those Eastern pyramids to
which every passing traveller adds a stone. We pass
along, the voyagers of the day, destined to complete
Qur individual education elsewhere, but the educi^tion
THE LAW. 41
of Humanity, which is seen by glimpses in each of us,
is slowly, progressively, and continuously evolved
through Humanity.
Humanity is the Word, living in God. The Spirit
of God fecundates it, and manifests itself through it
in greater purity and activity from epoch to epoch,
now through the instrumentality of an individual,
now through that of a people. From labour to
labour, from belief to belief, Humanity gradually
acquires a clearer perception of its own life, of its
own mission, of its God, and of His law.
Humanity is the successive incarnation of God. The
law of God is one, as God Himself is one ; but we
only discover it article by article, line by line, accord-
ing to the accumulated experience of the generations
that have preceded us, and according to the exten-
sion and increased intensity of association among
races, peoples, and individuals. No man, no people,
and no age may pretend to have discovered the whole
of the Law. The Moral Law, Humanity's Law of
Life, can only be discovered, in its entirety, by all
Humanity, united in holy association, when all the
forces and all the faculties that constitute our human
nature shall be developed and in action. But mean-
while that portion of Humanity most advanced in
education does, in its progress and development,
reveal to us a portion of the Law we seek to know.
Its history teaches us the design of God; its wants
teach us our duties; because our first duty is to
endeavor to aid the ascent of Humanity upon that
stage of education and improvement towards which
it has been prepared and matured by time and the
Divinity.
42 THE DUTIES OF MAN.
In order, therefore, to know the Law of God, you
must interrogate not only your own conscience, but
also the conscience and consent of Humanity. In
order to know your own duties you must interrogate
the present wants of Humanity. Morality is pro
gressive, as is your education and that of the human
race. The morality of Christianity was different from
that of Paganism; the morality of our own age dif-
fers from the morality of eighteen hundred years
ago.
Be assured that without education vou cannot
know your duties, and that whenever society pre-
vents you from obtaining education, the responsibil-
r ity of your error rests upon society, not upon you;
your responsibility begins on the day in which a path
to instruction is opened to you, and you neglect to
pursue it; on the day in which the means are offered
to you by which to transform the society which has
too long condemned you to ignorance, and you neg-
lect to seize them. You are not guilty because you
are ignorant, but you are guilty when you resign
yourselves to ignorance. You are guilty whenever —
although your conscience whispers that God did not
give you faculties without imposing upon you the
duty of developing them — you allow the faculty of
reflection to lie dormant within you; whenever — al-
though you know that God would not have given you
a love of truth without giving you the means by
which to attain it — you yet despairingly renounce
every effort to discover it, and accept as truth, with-
out examination, the assertions either of the temporal
powers or of the priest who has $old himself to
theiQ.
THE LAW. 43
God, the Father and Educator of Humanity^ reveals
his Law to Humanity through time and space. Inter-
rogate the tradition of Humanity — which is the Coun-
cil of your brother-men — not in the restricted circle
of an age or sect, but in all ages, and in the majority
of mankind past and present. Whensoever the con-
sent of Humanity corresponds ivith the teachings of your
oivn conscience^ you are certain of the Truth — certain, that
is, of having read one line of the law of God.
I believe in Humanity^ sole interpreter of the Law of
God on earth, and from the consent of Humanity, in
harmony with my individual conscience, I deduce
what 1 am now about to tell you with regard to your
duties.
CHAPTER IV.
DUTIES TOWARDS HUMANITY.
Your first duties — first, not as to time, but as to
importance, because, unless you understand these,
you can only imperfectly fulfill the rest — your first
duties are towards Humanity. You have duties as
citizens, as sons, as husbands, and as fathers; duties
sacred and inviolable, and of which I shall shortly
speak to you in derail; but that which constitutes the
sacredness and inviolability of these duties is the
mission, the duty, springing from your Human nature.
You are fathers in order that you may educate men
in the worship and fulfillment of the Law of God.
You are citizens, you have a country, in order that in
a given and limited sphere of action, the concourse
and assistance of a certain number of men, already
related to you by language, tendencies, and customs,
may enable you to labour more effectually for the
good of all men present and to come: a task in which
your solitary effort would be lost, falling powerless
and unheeded amid the immense multitude of your
fellow-beings.
They who pretend to teach you morality while
limiting your duties to those you owe to your family
and to your country, do but teach you a more or less
enlarged selfishness, tending to the injury of others
and to yourself. The Family and the Fatherland are
DUTIES TOWARDS HUMANITY. 45
like two circles, drawn within a larger circle which
contains both; they are two steps of the ladder you
have to climb; without them your ascent is impossi-
ble, but upon them it is forbidden to rest.
You are men : that is to say, creatures capable of
rational, social, and intellectual pvo^v^s^y solely through
the medium of association : a progress to which none
may assign a limit.
This is all we as yet know with regard to the law
of the life of Humanity. These characteristics con-
stitute human nature; these characteristics distinguish
you from the different creatures that surround you,
and are given to each of you as the germ you are
bound to fructify. Your whole life should tend to
the organized development and exercise of these
faculties of your nature. Whensoever you suppress,
or allow to be suppressed, one of these faculties,
whether completely or partially, you descend from
the rank of men to that of the inferior animals, and
violate your law of life, the Law of God. You de-
scend to the level of the brute whenever you sup-
press, or allow to be suppressed, any of the faculties
that constitute human nature either in yourselves or
others. God wills that you shall fulfill His law not as
individuals alone. Had He intended this. He would
have created you solitary. He wills that the Law
be fulfilled over the whole earth, among all the
creatures He created after His own image. He wills
that the Divine Idea of perfectibility and love which
He has incarnated in the world, shall be revealed in
ever-increasing brightness, and worshipped through
its gradual realization by His creatures.
In your terrestrial existence, limited both in educa-
46 THE DUTIES OF MAN.
tion and capacity, the realization of this Divine Idea
can only be most imperfect and momentary. Hu-
manity only — continuous in existence through the
passing generations, continuous in intellect through
the contributions of all its members — is capable of
gradually evolving, applying, and glorifying the
Divine Idea.
Life, therefore, was given to you by God in order
that you might employ that life for the benefit of
Humanity ; that you might direct your individual
faculties to aid the development of the faculties of
3'our brother-men, and contribute by your labour
another element to the collective work of Progress,
and the discovery of the truth, which the generations
are destined slowly but unceasingly to promote.
Your duty is to educate yourselves, and to educate
others ; to strive to perfect yourselves and to perfect
others.
It is true that God lives within you, but God lives
in all the men by whom the earth is peopled.
God is in the life of all the generations that have
been, are, and are to be. Past generations have pro-
gressively improved, and coming generations will
continue to improve, the conception which Humanity
forms of Him, of His Law, and of our duties. You
are bound to adore Him and to glorify Him whereso-
ever He manifests His presence. The Universe is His
Temple, and the sin of every unresisted or unex-
piated profanation of the Temple weighs on the head
of each and all of the Believers.
It is of no avail to assert your own purity, even
were true purity possible in isolation. Whensoever
you see corruption by your side, and do not strive
DUTIES TOWARDS HUMANITY. 47
against it, you betray your duty. It is of no avail
that you worship truth ; if you see your brother-men
ruled by error in some portion of the earth — our
common mother — and you do not both desire and
endeavour, so far as lies in your power, to overcome
that error, you betray your duty.
The image of God is disfigured in the immortal
souls of your fellow-men. God wills to be adored
through His Law, and His Law is violated and mis-
interpreted around you. Human nature is falsified
in the millions of men to whom, even as to you, God
has confided the associate fulfillment of His design.
And do you dare to call yourselves believers while you
remain inert ?
A People — Greek, Pole, Italian, Circassian — raises
the flag of country and independence, and combats,
conquers, or dies to defend it. What is it that causes
your hearts to beat at the news of those battles, that
makes them swell with joy at their victories, and sink
with sorrow at their defeats? A man — it may be a
foreigner in some remote corner of the world — arises,
and, amidst the universal silence, gives utterance to
certain ideas which he believes to be true; maintains
them through persecution, and in chains, or dies
upon the scaffold, and denies them not. Wherefo v
do you honor that man and call him saint and martyr-
Why do you respect, and teach your children to re-
spect, his memory? Why do you read so eagerly the
prodigies of patriotism registered in Grecian history,
and relate them to your children with a sense of
pride, as if they belonged to the history of your an-
cestors ?
These deeds of Greece are two thousand years old.
48 THE DUTIES OF MAN.
and belong to an epoch of civilization which is not,
and never can be, yours. These men whom you still
call martyrs, perhaps died for a faith which is not
yours, and certainly their death cut short their every
hope of individual progress on earth. That people
whom you admire, in its victories or in its fall, is a
foreign people, almost unknown to you and speaking
a strange tongue. Their way of life has no influence
on yours. What matters it, then, to you whether
they be ruled by Pope or Sultan, by the King of
Bavaria, the Czar of Russia, or a free government
sprung from the consent of the nation?
It is that there is in your heart a voice that cries
unto you: "Those men of two thousand years ago,
those populations now fighting afar off, that martyr for
^i an idea for which you would not die, are your brothers;
brothers not only in community of origin and of
nature, but in community of labor and of aim.
Those Greeks passed away, but their deeds remained;
and were it not for them, you would not have reached
your present degree of moral and intellectual develop-
ment. Those populations consecrate with their blood
an idea of national liberty for which you too would
combat. That martyr proclaimed by his death that
man is bound to sacrifice all things, and, if need be,
life itself, for that which he believes to be truth.
What matters it that he, and all of those who thus
seal their faith with their blood, cut short their indi-
vidual progress on earth? God will provide for them
elsewhere. But it is of import that the coming
generation, taught by your struggle and your sacri-
fice, may arise stronger and nobler than you have
been, in fuller comprehension of the Law, in greater
btjTIES TOWARDS HUMANITY. 4$
adoration of the truth. It is of import tha> human
nature, fortified by these examples, may improve, de-
velop, and realize still further the Design of God on
earth, and wheresoever human nature shall improve
or develop, wheresoever a new truth be discovered,
wheresoever a step be taken on the path of educa-
tion, progress, and morality, that step taken, and that
truth discovered, will sooner or later benefit all Hu-
manity.
" You are all soldiers in one army, an army which /
is advancing by different paths, and divided into
different corps, to the conquest of one sole aim. As
yet you only look to your immediate leaders; diver- '
sity of uniform and of watchword, the distances
which separate the different bodies of troops, and the
mountains that conceal them one from another, fre-
quently cause you to forget this great truth, and con-
centrate your thoughts exclusively on your own im-
mediate goal. But there is One above you who sees
the whole and directs all your movements. God
alone has the plan of the battle, and He at length will
unite you in a single camp, beneath a single ban-
ner."
How great is the distance between this faith, which
thrills within our souls, and which will be the basis
of the morality of the coming epoch, and the faith
that was the basis of the morality of the generations
of what we term antiquity ! And how intimate is the
connection between the idea we form of the Divine
Government and that we form of our own duties !
The first men felt God, but without comprehend-
ing or even seeking to comprehend Him or His law.
They felt Him in His power, not in His love. They
4
50 THE DUTIES OF MA*J.
conceived a confused idea of some sort of relation
between Him and their own individuality, but noth-
ing beyond this. Able to withdraw themselves but
little from the sphere of visible objects, they sought
to incarnate Him in one of these : in the tree they
had seen struck by the thunderbolt, the rock beside
which they had raised their tent, the animal which
first presented itself before them. This was the wor-
ship which, in the history of Religions, is termed
Fetichism,
In those days men comprehended nothing beyond
the Family^ the reproduction in a certain form of
their own individuality; all beyond the family circle
were strangers, or more often enemies; to aid them-
selves and their families was to them the sole founda-
tion of morality.
In later days the idea of God was enlarged. From
visible objects men timidly raised their thoughts to
abstractions; they learned to generalize. God was
no longer regarded as the Protector of the family only,
but of the association of many families, of the cities,
of the peoples. Thus to fetichism succeeded poly-
theism — the worship of many gods. The sphere of
action of morality was also enlarged. Men recog-
nized the existence of more extended duties than
those due to the family alone; they strove for the
advancement of th^ people y of the nation. Yet, never-
theless, Humanity was still ignored. Each nation
stigmatized foreigners as barbarians^ regarded them
as such, and endeavoured to conquer or oppress them
by force or fraud. Each nation also contained
foreigners or barbarians within its own circle; mill-
ions of men not admitted to join in the religious
DUTIES TOWARDS HUMANITY. 5 1
rites of the citizens, and believed to be ot an inferior
nature: slaves among free men. The idea of the
Unity of the human race could only be conceived as
a consequence of the Unity of God. And the Unity
of God, though forefelt by a few rare thinkers of
antiquity, and openly declared by Moses (but with
the fatal defect of believing one sole people His
elect) was not a recognized creed until towards the
end of the Roman Empire, and through the teachings
of Christianity.
Foremost and grandest amid the teachings of
Christ, were these two inseparable truths — There is
but one God; All men are the Sons of God; and the
promulgation of these two truths changed the face of
the world, and enlarged the moral circle to the con-
fines of the inhabited globe. To the duties of men
towards the Family and Country were added duties
towards Humanity. Man then learned that whereso-
ever there existed a human bfting, there existed a
brother; a brother with a soul as immortal as his own,
destined like himself to ascend towards the Creator,
and on whom he was bound to bestow love, a knowl-
edge of the faith, and help and counsel when needed.
Then did the Apostles utter words of sublime im-
port, in prevision of those great truths of which the
germ was contained in Christianity; truths which
have been misunderstood or betrayed by their suc-
cessors. " For as we have many members in one body,
and all members have not the same office; so we, being
manyy are one body in Christy and every one members one
of another " (St. Paul, Rom., xii. 4. 5.)
" And other sheep I have^ which are not of this fold;
them <^so I must brings and they shall hear my voice; and
$2 tttE DOnelS OP MAM.
fA^re shall be one fold and one shepherd** (St. John,
X. 1 6.)
And at the present day, after eighteen hundred
years of labour, study, and experience, we have yet
to develop these germs, we have yet to apply these
truths, not only to each individual, but to all that
complex sum of human forces and faculties, present
and future, which is named Humanity. We have yet
to teach mankind not only that Humanity is one Sole
Being, and must be governed by one sole law, but
that the first article of the law is Progress; — progress
here, on this earth, where we are bound to realize, as
far as in us lies, the design of God, and educate our-
selves for higher destinies.
We have still to teach mankind that as Humanity
is one sole body, all we, being members of that body,
are bound to labour for its development, and to seek
to render its life more harmonious, vigourous, and
active. We have still to be convinced that we can
only elevate ourselves towards God through the souls
of our fellow-men, and that it is our duty to improve
and purify them, even though they seek not such im-
provement and purification. And we have still — since
only by entire Humanity can the design of God be fully
accomplished here below — we have still to substitute
a work of association tending to elevate the mass, for
the exercise of charity to>yards individuals, and to
organize both the family and the country to that
aim.
Other and vaster duties will be revealed to us in
the future, in proportion as we acquire a clearer and
less imperfect conception of our law of life.
Thus does God the Father, by means of a slow, but
DUTIES TOWARDS HUMANITY. 53
uninterrupted, religious education, direct the advance
of Humanity, and our individual improvement corre-
sponds with that advance.
Our individual improvement corresponds with that
advance; nor, without the advance and improvement
of the whole, may you hope for any lasting improve-
ment in your moral and material individual condi-
tion. Strictly speaking, you cannot, even if you
would, separate your life from that of Humanity.
You live in it, by it, and for it. Your souls — with
the exception of certain men of extraordinary
power — cannot rid themselves of the influence of the
elements amongst which they move; even as your
bodies, however robust, cannot rid themselves of the
effects of the corrupt air by which they are sur-
rounded. How many are there among you, who,
knowing that they thereby expose them to persecu-
tion, yet strive to educate your children to absolute
truthfulness, in a society where ignorance or preju-
dice enforces silence or concealment of two-thirds of
their opinions ? How many of you strive to teach
them to despise wealth in a society wherein gold is
the sole power that obtains respect, influence, and
honor ? What mother is there among you, who,
although belonging to that faith which adores in
Christ the voluntary martyr for Humanity, yet would
not throw her arms round her son's neck, and seek to
wean him from all perilous endeavour to benefit his
brother-men ?
And even should you have strength to teach the
better lesson, would not all society, with its thousand
tongues and thousands of evil examples, destroy the
effect of your words ? Can you purify and exalt your
54 THE DUTIES OF MAN.
own souls in an atmosphere of morai degradation
and contagion ? or — to descend to your material con-
dition — think you it can be duly ameliorated, unless
bv the amelioration of all ?
Here in England, where I now write, millions of
pounds sterling are annually bestowed in private
charity for the relief of individual misery; yet that
misery annually increases, and private charity is
proved impotent to meet the evil, and the necessity
of collective organic remedies is ever more univers-
ally acknowledged. And in countries despotically
governed, where taxes and restrictions are imposed
at the sole caprice of the ruler, the cost of whose
armies, spies, agents, and pensioners is continually
increasing as the necessity of providing for the safety
of the despotism increases, think you that a con-
stant activity and development of industry and manu-
factures is possible? Think you that it will suffice to
improve the government and social condition of your
own country? No; it will not suffice. No nation
lives exclusively on its own produce at the present
day. You live by exchanges, by importation and ex-
portation. A foreign nation impoverished, and in
which the number of consumers is diminished, is one
market the less for you. A foreign commerce ruined
ill consequence of evil administration, produces mis-
. iiief and crises in your own. Failures in America
md elsewhere, entail failures in England. Credit
aow-a-days is no longer a national but a European
institution.
Moreover, all other governments will be hostile to
your national improvements, for there is an alliance
among the princes, who were among the first to un-
J
DUTIES TOWARl S HUMANITY. 55
derstand that the socia question has become a gene-
ral question at the present day.
The only lasting hope for you is in the general
amelioration, improvement, and fraternity of all the
peoples of Europe, and, through Europe, of Humanity.
Therefore, my brothers, in the name of your duty,
and for the sake of your interest, never forget that
your first duties — duties, without fulfilling which you
cannot rightly fulfill those towards your country and
family — are those towards Humanity.
Let your words and your actions be for all men, as
God is for all men in His Law and Love. In whatso-
ever land you live, wheresoever there arises a man
to combat for the right, the just, and the true, that
man is your brother. Wheresoever a man is. tortured
through error, injustice, or tyranny, that man is your
brother. Free men or slaves, you are all brothers.
You are one in origin, one in the Divine Law that gov-
erns you, and one in the goal you are destined to at-
tain. Your faith must be one, your actions one, and
one the banner under which you combat. Say not.
The language we speak is different. Acts, tears, and
martyrdom are a language common to all men, and
which all understand. Say not. Humanity is too vasty
and we are too weak, God does not judge the power,
3ut the intention. Love Humanity. Ask yourselves
las to every act you commit within the circle of family
or country, "7/" what I no7v do were done by and for all
men, would it be beneficial or injurious to Humanity 1 "
And if your conscience tells you it would be injuri-
ous, desist; desist, even though it seem that an im-
mediate advantage to your country or family would
be the result.
54 THE DUTIES OF MAN.
own souls in an atmosphere of morai degradation
and contagion ? or — to descend to your material con-
dition — think you it can be duly ameliorated, unless
bv the amelioration of all ?
Here in England, where I now write, millions of
pounds sterling are annually bestowed in private
charity for the relief of individual misery; yet that
misery annually increases, and private charity is
proved impotent to meet the evil, and the necessity
of collective organic remedies is ever more univers-
ally acknowledged. And in countries despotically
governed, where taxes and restrictions are imposed
at the sole caprice of the ruler, the cost of whose
armies, spies, agents, and pensioners is continually
increasing as the necessity of providing for the safety
of the despotism increases, think you that a con-
stant activity and development of industry and manu-
factures is possible? Think you that it will suffice to
improve the government and social condition of your
own country? No; it will not suffice. No nation
lives exclusively on its own produce at the present
day. You live by exchanges, by importation and ex-
portation. A foreign nation impoverished, and in
which the number of consumers is diminished, is one
market the less for you. A foreign commerce ruined
ill consequence of evil administration, produces mis-
chief and crises in your own. Failures in America
md elsewhere, entail failures in England. Credit
aow-a-days is no longer a national but a European
institution.
Moreover, all other governments will be hostile to
your national improvements, for there is an alliance
among the princes, who were among the first to un-
i
DUTIES TOWARl S HUMANITY. 55
derstand that the socia question has become a gene-
ral question at the present day.
The only lasting hope for you is in the general
amelioration, improvement, and fraternity of all the
peoples of Europe, and, through Europe, of Humanity.
Therefore, my brothers, in the name of your duty,
and for the sake of your interest, never forget that
your first duties — duties, without fulfilling which you
cannot rightly fulfill those towards your country and
family — are those towards Humanity.
Let your words and your actions be for all men, as
God is for all men in His Law and Love. In whatso-
ever land you live, wheresoever there arises a man
to combat for the right, the just, and the true, that
man is your brother. Wheresoever a man h tortured
through error, injustice, or tyranny, that man is your
brother. Free men or slaves, you are all brothers.
You are one in origin, one in the Divine Law that gov-
erns you, and one in the goal you are destined to at-
tain. Your faith must be one, your actions one, and
one the banner under which you combat. Say not,
T/ie language we speak is different. Acts, tears, and
martyrdom are a language common to all men, and
which all understand. Say not. Humanity is too vasty
nd we are too weak, God does not judge the power,
ut the intention. Love Humanity. Ask yourselves
s to every act you commit within the circle of family
or country, "//" what I no7v do were done by and for all
men, would it be beneficial or injurious to Humanity ? "
And if your conscience tells you it would be injuri-
ous, desist; desist, even though it seem that an im-
mediate advantage to your country or family would
be the result.
\
54 THE DUTIES OF MAN.
own souls in an atmosphere of morai degradation
and contagion ? or — to descend to your material con-
dition — think you it can be duly ameliorated, unless
bv the amelioration of all ?
Here in England, where I now write, millions of
pounds sterling are annually bestowed in private
charity for the relief of individual misery; yet that
misery annually increases, and private charity is
proved impotent to meet the evil, and the necessity
of collective organic remedies is ever more univers-
ally acknowledged. And in countries despotically
governed, where taxes and restrictions are imposed
at the sole caprice of the ruler, the cost of whose
armies, spies, agents, and pensioners is continually
increasing as the necessity of providing for the safety
of the despotism increases, think you that a con-
stant activity and development of industry and manu-
factures is possible? Think you that it will suffice to
improve the government and social condition of your
own country? No; it will not suffice. No nation
lives exclusively on its own produce at the present
day. You live by exchanges, by importation and ex-
portation. A foreign nation impoverished, and in
which the number of consumers is diminished, is one
market the less for you. A foreign commerce ruined
in consequence of evil administration, produces mis-
chief and crises in your own. Failures in America
md elsewhere, entail failures in England. Credit
aow-a-days is no longer a national but a European
institution.
Moreover, all other governments will be hostile to
your national improvements, for there is an alliance
among the princes, who were among the first to un-
DUTIES TOWARl S HUMANITY. 55
derstand that the socia question has become a gene-
ral question at the present day.
The only lasting hope for you is in the general
^ amelioration, improvement, and fraternity of all the
peoples of Europe, and, through Europe, of Humanity.
Therefore, my brothers, in the name of your duty,
and for the sake of your interest, never forget that
your first duties — duties, without fulfilling which you
cannot rightly fulfill those towards your country and
family — are those towards Humanity.
Let your words and your actions be for all men, as
God is for all men in His Law and Love. In whatso-
ever land you live, wheresoever there arises a man
to combat for the right, the just, and the true, that
man is your brother. Wheresoever a man it tortured
through error, injustice, or tyranny, that man is your
brother. Free men or slaves, you are all brothers.
You are one in origin, one in the Divine Law that gov-
erns you, and one in the goal you are destined to at-
tain. Your faith must be one, your actions one, and
one the banner under which you combat. Say not,
T/if language we speak is different. Acts, tears, and
martyrdom are a language common to all men, and
which all understand. Say not, Humanity is too vasty
and we are too weak, God does not judge the power,
3ut the intention. Love Humanity. Ask yourselves
las to every act you commit within the circle of family
or country, "7/ what I noav do were done by and for all
men, would it be beneficial or injurious to Humanity ? "
And if your conscience tells you it would be injuri-
ous, desist; desist, even though it seem that an im-
mediate advantage to your country or family would
be the result.
6o THE DUTIES OF MAN.
employ are gathered together; nor may we reject
them without disobeying the plan of the Almighty,
and diminishing our own strength.
In labouring for our own country on the right prin-
ciple, we labour for Humanity. Our country is the
fulcrum of the lever we have to wield for the com-
mon good. If we abandon the fulcrum, we run the
risk of rendering ourselves useless not only to
Humanity but to our country itself. Before men can
associate with the nations of which Humanity is
composed, they must have a national existence.
There is no true association except among equals. It
. is only through our country that we can have a
^ recognized collective existence.
Humanity is a vast army advancing to the con-
quest of lands unknown, against enemies both pow-
erful and astute. The peoples are the different corps,
the divisions of that army. Each of them has its
post assigned to it, and its special operation to exe-
cute; and the common victory depends upon the ex-
actitude with which those distinct operations are ful-
filled. Disturb not the order of battle. Forsake not
the banner given to you by God. Wheresoever you
may be, in the centre of whatsoever people circum-
stances may have placed you, be ever ready to com-
bat for the liberty of that people, should it be neces^
sary, but combat in such wise that the blood you shed
may reflect glory, not on yourself alone, but on your
country. Say not /, but We, Let each man among you
strive to incarnate his country in himself. Let each man
among you regard himself as a guarantor, responsible
for his fellow-countrymen, and learn so to govern his
actions as to cause his country to be loved and re-
DUTIES TOWARDS YOUR COUNTRY. Ol
spected through him. Your country is the sign of /
the Mission God has given you to fulfill towards/
Humanity. The faculties and forces of all her sons
should be associated in the accomplishment of that
mission. The true country is a community of free men /
and equals, bound together in fraternal concord to
labour towards a common aim. You are bound to
make it and to maintain it such. The country is not
an aggregatiofiy but an association. There is, therefore,
no true country without a uniform right. There is
no true country where the uniformity of that right is
violated by the existence of caste privilege and in-
equality. Where the activity of a portion of the
powers and faculties of the individual is either can-
celled or dormant; where there is not a common
Principle, recognized, accepted, and developed by all,
there is no true Nation, no People; but only a mul-
titude, a fortuitous agglomeration of men whom cir-
cumstances have called together and whonA cir-
cumstances may again divide. In the name of the
love you bear your country, you must peacefully but
untiringly combat the existence of privilege and in-
equality in the land that gave you life.
There is but one sole legitimate privilege, the privi-
lege of Genius when it reveals itself united with vir-
tue. But this is a privilege given by God, and when
you acknowledge it, and follow its inspiration, you do
so freely, exercising your own reason and your own
choice. Every privilege which demands submission
from you in virtue of power, inheritance, or any other
right than the Right common to all, is a usurpation
and a tyranny which you are bound to resist and
destroy.
62 THE DUTIES OF MAN.
Be your country your Temple: God at the sum-
mit; a people of equals at the base.
Accept no other formula, no other moral law, if you
would not dishonour alike your country and your-
selves. Let all secondary laws be but the gradual
regulation of your existence by the progressive appli-
cation of this Supreme law. And in order that they
may be such, it is necessary that all of you should
aid in framing them. Laws framed only by a single
fraction of the citizens, can never, in the very nature
of things, be other than the mere expression of
the thoughts, aspirations, and desires of that frac-
tion; the representation, not of the country, but of
a third or fourth part, of a class or zone of the
country.
The laws should be the expression of the universal
aspiration, and promote the universal good. They
should be a pulsation of the heart of the nation. The
entire nation should, either directly or indirectly,
legislate.
By yielding up this mission into the hands of a
a few, you substitute the selfishness of one class for
the Country, which is the union of all classes.
Country is not only a mere zone of territory. The
kI true Country is the Idea to which it gives birth; it is
the Thought of love, the sense of communion which
unites in one all the sons of that territory.
So long as a single one amongst your brothers has
no vote to represent him in the development of the
national life, so long as there is one left to vegetate
in ignorance where others are educated, so long as a
single man, able and willing to work, languishes in
poverty through want of work to do, you have no
bUTIES TOWARDS VOtJR COUNTRY. 63
Country in the sense itt Which Country ought to exist
— the country of all and for all.
^/ Education, labour, and the franchise, are the three
main pillars of the Nation; rest not until you have
built them thoroughly up with your own labour and
exertions.
Be it yours to evolve the life of your country in
loveliness and strength; free from all servile fears or
sceptical doubts; maintaining as its basis the People;
as its guide the principles of its Religious Faith,
logically and energetically applied; its strength, the
united strength of all; its aim, the fulfillment of the
mission given to it by God.
And so long as you are ready to die for Humanity,
the life of your country will be immortal.
CHAPTER VI.
DUTIES TOWARDS THE FAMILY.
The Family is the Heart's Fatherland. There is
in the Family an Angel, possessed of a mysterious
influence of grace, sweetness, love; an Angel who
renders our duties less arid and our sorrows less
titter. The only pure and unalloyed happiness, the
only joys untainted by grief granted to man on this
earth are — thanks be given to this Angel ! — the happi-
ness and joys of the family. He who, from some fatality
of position, has been unable to live the calm life of
the Family, sheltered beneath this Angel's wing, has
a shadow of sadness cast over his soul, and a void in
his heart which naught can fill, as I, who write these
pages for you, know.
Bless the God who created this Angel, O you who
share the joys and consolations of the Family ! Hold
them not in light esteem, because you fancy you
might find more ardent pleasures and more facile
consolations elsewhere. There is in the family an
element rarely found elsewhere — the element of dura-
bility. Family affections wind themselves round
your heart slowly and all unobserved; but tenacious
and enduring as the ivy round the tree, they cling to
you hour by hour, mingling with and becoming
a portion of your very existence. Very often you
DUTIES TOWARDS THE FAMILY. 65
are unconscious of them, because they are a part
of yourselves; but when once you lose them, you
feel as if an intimate and necessary portion of
your life were gone. You wander restless- and
unhappy; it may be that you again succeed in find-
ing some brief delights and consolations, but never
the supreme consolation of calm; the calm of the
waters of the lake, the calm of trusting sleep, a re-
pose like that of the child on its mother's breast.
This Angel of the family is woman. Whether as
mother, wife, or sister, woman is the caress of exist-
ence, the soft sweetness of affection diffused over its
fatigues, a reflection in the individual of that loving
Providence which watches over Humanity. She has
in her a treasure of gentle consolation sufficient to
soothe every sorrow. Moreover, she is for each of
us the Initiatrix of the future. The child learns its
first lesson of love from its mother's kiss. In the
first sacred kiss of the beloved one, man learns the
lesson of hope and faith in life, and hope and faith
create that yearning after progress, and that power
to achieve it step by step — that//////r<?, in short — whose
living symbol is the infant, our link with the genera-
tions to come. It is through woman that the
family — with its Divine mystery of reproduction —
points to Eternity.
Hold, then, the family sacred, my brothers ! Look
upon it as one of the indestructible conditions of life,
and reject every attempt made to undermine it,
either by men imbued with a false and brutish phil-
osophy, or by shallow thinkers, who, irritated at see-
ing it too often made the nursery of selfishness and the
spirit of caste, imagine, like the savage, that the sole
66 THE DUTIES OF MAN.
remedy for this evil growth, is the destruction of the
tree itself.
The conception of the family is not human, but
Divine, and no human power can extinguish it. Like
the Fatherland — even more than the Fatherland —
the family is an element of existence.
I have said, even more than the Fatherland. Dis-
tinctions of country — sacred now — may possibly dis-
appear whenever man shall bear the moral law of
Humanity inscribed upon his own heart, but the
family will endure while man himself endures. It is
the cradle of Humanity. Like every other element
of human life, it is, of course, susceptible of progress,
and from epoch to epoch its tendencies and aspira-
tions are improved, but it can never be cancelled.
Your mission is evermore to sanctify the family, and
to link it ever more closely with the country. That
which the country is to Humanity, the family must
be to the country. Even as the scope and object of
our love of country is, as I have told you, to educate
you as men^ so the scope and object of the family is
to educate you as citizens. The family and the
country are the two extreme points of one and the
same line. And wheresoever this is not the case the
family degenerates into selfishness, a selfishness the
more odious and brutal, inasmuch as it prostitutes
and perverts from their true aim the most sacred
things that be — our affections.
Love and respect woman. See in her not merely a
comfort, but a force, an inspiration, the redoubling of
your intellectual and moral faculties.
Cancel from your minds every idea of superioritv
over woman. You have none whatsoever.
DUTIES TOWARDS THE FAMILY. 6j
Long prejudice, an inferior education, and a peren-
nial legal inequality and injustice, have created that
apparent intellectual inferiority which has been con-
verted into an argument for continued oppression.
But does not the history of every oppression teach
us how the oppressor ever seeks his justification and
support by appealing to a fact of his own creation ?
The feudal castes that withheld education from the
sons of the people, excluded them, on the grounds of
that very want of education, from the rights of the citi-
zen, from the sanctuary wherein laws are framed, and
from that right to vote which is the initiation of their
social mission. The slaveholders of America declare
the black race radically inferior and incapable of
education, and yet persecute those who seek to in-
struct them. For half a century the supporters of
the reigning families in Italy have declared the
Italians unfit for freedom, and meanwhile, by their
laws, and by the brute force of hireling armies, they
close every path through which we might overcome
the obstacles to our improvement, where such really
exist, as if tyranny could ever be a means of educat-
ing men for liberty.
Now, we men have ever been, and still are, guilty
of a similar crime towards v/oman. Avoid even the
shadow or semblance of this crime; there is none
heavier in the sight of God, for it divides the human
family into two classes, and imposes or accepts the
subjugation of one class to the other.
In the sight of God the Father there is neither man
or woman. There is only the human beings that being
in whom, whether the form be of male or female,
those characteristics which distinguish Humanity
68 THE DUTIES OF MAN.
from the brute creation are united, namely: the
social tendency, and the capacity of education and
progress.
Wheresoever these characteristics exist, the human
nature is revealed, and thence perfect equality both
of rights and of duties.
Like two distinct branches springing from the
same trunk, man and woman are varieties springing
from the common basis — Humanity. There is no in-
equality between them, but, even as is often the case
among men, diversity of tendency and of special
vocation. Are two notes of the same musical chord
unequal or of different nature? Man and woman are
the two notes without which the Human chord is im-
possible.
Suppose two peoples, one of which is called by
circumstances and by special tendencies to the mis-
sion of diffusing the idea of human association by
means of colonization, and the other to teach that
idea by the production of universally admired liter-
ature and art; are their general rights and duties
therefore different? Both of these people are, con-
sciously or unconsciously. Apostles of the same Divine
Idea, equals and brothers in that idea.
Man and Woman, even as these two peoples, fulfill
different functions in Humanity, but these functions
are equally sacred, equally manifestations of that
Thought of God which He has made the soul of the
universe.
Consider woman, therefore, as the partner and
companion, not merely of your joys and sorrows, but
of your thoughts, your aspirations, your studies and
your endeavours after social amelioration. Consider
DUTIES TOWARDS THE FAMILY. 69
her your equal in your civil and political life. Be ye
the two human wings that lift the soul towards the
Ideal we are destined to attain. The Mosaic Bible
has declared: God created many and woman from man;
but your Bible, the Bible of the Future, will proclaim
that God created Humanity^ made manifest in the woman
and the man.
Love the children given to you by God, but love
them with a true, deep, and earnest affection; not
with the enervated, blind, unreasonable love, which
is but selfishness in you, and ruin to them. In
the name of all that is most sacred, never forget that
through them you have in charge the future genera-
tions; that towards them, as souls confided to your
keeping, towards Humanity, and before God, you are
under the heaviest responsibility known to mankind.
You are bound to instruct your children, not merely
in the joys and desires of life, but in life itself; in its
duties, and in its moral law of government. Few
mothers, few fathers, in this irreligious age — and
especially in the wealthier classes — understand the
true gravity of their educational mission. Few
mothers, few fathers, remember that the numerous
victims, the incessant struggles, and the life-long
martyrdoms of our day, are in a great measure the
fruit of the selfishness instilled thirty years back by
the weak mothers and heedless fathers who allowed
their children to accustom themselves to regard life,
not as a mission and a duty, but as a search after
happiness and a study of their own well-being. For
you, the sons of labour, these dangers are less; the
greater number of you know only too well what it is
to live the life of privation. But, compelled by your
70 THE DUTIES OF MAN.
inferior social position to constant toil, you are also
less able to bestow upon your children a fitting edu-
cation. Nevertheless, even you can in part fulfill
your arduous mission, both by word and by example.
You can do it by example.
" Your children will resemble you, and become cor-
rupt or virtuous in proportion as you are yourself
corrupt or virtuous. How shall they become honest,
charitable, and humane, if you are without charity for
your brothers ? How shall they restrain their grosser
appetites, if they see you given up to intemperance ?
How shall they preserve their native innocence, if you
shrink not from offending their modesty by indecent
act or obscene word ? You are the living model by
which their pliant nature is fashioned. It depends,
then, upon you, whether your children be men or
brutes." (Lamennais, Words of a Believer^
And you may educate your children by your words.
Speak to them of your country; of what she was,
and is, and ought to be. At evening when, beneath
the smile of their mother and amid the innocent
prattle of your children seated on your knee, you for-
get the day's fatigue, repeat to them the names and
deeds of the good men who have loved their country
and the people, and who have striven, amid sorrows,
calumny, and persecution, to elevate their destiny.
Instil into their young hearts the strength to resist
injustice and oppression. Let them learn from your
lips, and the calm approval of their mother, how
lovely is the path of virtue; how noble it is to become
apostles of the truth, how holy to sacrifice themselves,
if need be, for their fellows. Infuse in*^o their tender
minds, not merely the energy of resistance to every
DUTIES TOWARDS THE FAMILY. 7 1
false or unjust authority, but due reverence for the
sole, legitimate, and true authority — that of virtue
crowned by genius. See that they grow up enemies
alike to tyranny and anarchy, and in a Religion of a
conscience inspired, but not enchained, by tradition.
The Nation is bound to aid you in this work. And
you have a right to exact this aid in your children's
name. There is no true Nation without a National
Education.
Love and reverence your Parents. Let not the
family that issues from you make you unmindful of
that from which you sprang. Too often do the new
ties weaken the old, whereas they should be but
another link in the chain of love that should unite
the three generations of the family in one. Surround
the gray hairs of your mother and father with tender
affection and respectful care even to their last day.
Strew their path to the tomb with flowers. Let your
constant love shed a perfume of faith and immor-
tality over their weary souls. And be the affection
you bestow on your own parents a pledge of that you
shall receive from your children.
Parents, sisters, brothers, wives, and children, be
they all to you as branches springing from the same
stem. Sanctify the family by unity of love, and make
of it the Temple wherein you unite to bear sacrifice
to your country.
I know not whether you will be happy if you act
thus; but I do know that even in the midst of advers-
ity you will find that serene peace of the heart, that
repose of the tranquil conscience, which will give
you strength in every trial, and cheer your souls with
a glimpse of heavenly azure even in the darkest storm.
CHAPTER VII.
DUTIES TOWARDS YOURSELVES.
I HAVE already said to you: You have lifcy therefore
you have a Law of life. To develop yourselves^ to act
and live according to your Law of life, is your first, or
rather your sole, duty.
I ha^e told you that God has given you two means
of arrivip.g at a knowledge of your Law of life. He
has given you your own conscience, and the con-
science of Humanity, the common consent of your
fellow-men. I have told you that whenever, on inter-
rogating your own conscience, you find its voice in
harmony with the mighty voice of the human race
transmitted to you by history, you may be certain of
holding an immutable and eternal truth.
At present it is difficult for you fitly to interrogate
this mighty voice of Humanity transmitted by his-
tory. You are in want of really good popular books
on this subject, or you have not time to study them.
But the men whose intellect and virtue have rendered
them the best exponents of historical study and of the
science of Humanity, during the last half century,
have deduced from them some of the characteristics
of our Law of life.
They have discovered that our human nature is
essentially social and susceptible of education. They
PUTIES TOWARDS YOURSELVES. 73
have discerned that, as there is and can be but one
sole God, so there is and can be but one sole Law,
governing alike individual and collective man. They
have discerned that the fundamental character of
this law is PROGRESS.
From this truth — irrefutable, because confirmed by
every branch of human knowledge — are deduced all
your duties towards yourselves, and also all your
rights. The last may be summed up in one, viz.:
the right to be in no way impede d^ and to be to a certain
extent assisted, in the fulfillment of your duties. You
are, and you feel within you that you are, free agents.
All the sophisms of the wretched philosophy that
seeks to substitute the doctrine of I know not what
fatalism for the cry of our human conscience, avail
not to silence the two invincible witnesses in favour
of human liberty — Remorse and Martyrdom,
From Socrates to Jesus, from Jesus down to men
who, from time to time, still die for their country, all
the martyrs of Faith protest against the servile doc-
trine, and cry aloud unto you: "We also loved life,
we also loved the beings who made that life dear,
and who implored us to yield. Every impulse of our
hearts cried LIVE! But, for the salvation of the
generations to come, we chose to die."
From Cain down to the vulgar spy of the present
day, all the betrayers of their fellows, all the men
who have chosen the path of evil, have heard and
hear in the depths of their secret soul a voice of
blame, disquiet, and reproof, which says unto them :
" Wherefore did you forsake the right path /**
You are free agents, and therefore responsible.
From this moral liberty results your right to political
74 THE DUTIES OF MAN.
liberty, your duty to achieve it and maintain it invio-
late; and the duty of others not to restrain you
therein.
You are susceptible of education. There is in each
of you a certain sum of moral tendencies and intel-
lectual capacity to which education alone can give
life and movement, and which, if uneducated, remain
inert and sterile, or but reveal themselves by fits,
and without regular development. Education is the
bread of the soul. Even as physical organic life is
unable to flourish and expand without material ali-
ment, so does our moral and intellectual life require
for its expansion and manifestation the external influ-
ence, and the assimilation — in part at least — of the
affections and tendencies of others.
Individual life springs up like the flower. Each
variety is gifted with a special existence and a special
character, though growing upon the common soil
and nourished by the elements common to the life of
all. The individual is an offshoot of Humanity, and
aliments and renews its vital forces in the vital force
of Humanity. This work of alimentation and reno-
vation is accomplished by Education, which trans-
mits (directly or indirectly) to the individual the
results of the progress of the whole human race.
Education, therefore, is not merely a necessity of
your true life; it is also a holy communion with
your fellow-men, with the generations who lived (that
is to say, thought and acted) before you, that you are
bound to obtain for yourselves; it is a moral and intel-
lectual education, which should embrace and fecundate
all the faculties which God has given you, even as seed
to fructify, and as the means with which to constitute
DUTIES TOWARDS YOURSELVES. 75
and maintain the link between your individual life
and the life of collective Humanity.
And in order that this work of education may be
more rapidly achieved, in order that your individual
life may be more intimately and surely linked with
the collective life of your brothers (the life of
Humanity), God has created you beings eminently
social.
Each of the inferior beings can live alone, without
communion save with Nature, with the elements of
the physical world. You cannot. You have need of
your brother-men at every step, and cannot satisfy
the simplest wants of your existence without aiding
yourself by their work. Superior to all other beings
when in association with your fellows, you are, when
isolated, inferior in force to many of the lower ani-
mals, weak, and incapable of development and of
fullness of life. All the noblest aspirations of your
heart, — such as love of country — even the least elevated
— such as the desire of glory and praise, — indicate
your innate tendency to mingle your existence with
the life of the millions by whom you are surrounded.
You are, then, created for Association.
Association centuples your strength; it makes the
thoughts of others, and the progress of others, your
own, while it elevates and sanctifies your nature
through the affections and the growing sentiment of
the unity of the human family. In proportion as
your association with your brother-men is extended,
in proportion as it is intimate and comprehensive,
will you advance on the path of individual improve-
ment. The Law of Life cannot be fulfilled in its en-
tirety save by the united labour of all. For every
76 THE DUTIES OF MAN.
Step taken in progress, for every new discovery of a
portion of that Law, history shows a corresponding
extension of human association, a more extended
contact and communication between peoples and
peoples.
Before the first Christians came to declare the
unity of human nature, in opposition to the pagan
philosophy that admitted two human natures (that
of the master and that of the slave), the Roman
people had already carried their eagles across all the
known countries of Europe.
Before the papacy (baleful to mankind at the
present day, but useful during the first ages of its
institution) proclaimed the superiority of Spiritual to
Temporal Authority^ the barbarian invaders had vio-
lently brought into contact the Latin and Germanic
worlds.
Before the idea of liberty — as applied not only to
individuals but to peoples — had produced the con-
ception of Nationality which now agitates and is des-
tined to triumph in Europe, the wars of the Revolu-
tion and the Empire had aroused and called into
action an element until then remote, the Slavonian
peoples.
Finally you ^x^ progressive beings.
This word of P ROG RESS, unknown to antiquity,
is destined hendeTorth To be a sacred word to Human-
j ity. In it is included an entire social, political, and
V' religious transformation. The ancients, the men of
the old Oriental and Pagan religions, believed in
fate, in chance, in a hidden, incomprehensible power,
the arbitrator of human things; a power alternately
creator and destroyer, the action of which man was
DUTIES TOWARDS YOURSELVES. 77
neither able to understand, accelerate, nor promote.
They believed man to be incapable of founding any
stable or permanent work on earth. They believed
that nations, destined to move forever in a circle
similar to that described by individuals here below,
arose, became powerful, and sank in decay, doomed
infallibly to perish.
With a mental horizon thus restricted, and desti-
tute of all historical knowledge save that of their
own nation, or it might be of their own city, they re-
garded the human race as a mere aggregate of men,
without any general collective Life or Law, and based
their ideas solely upon the contemplation of the indi-
vidual. The natural consequence of such a doctrine
was a disposition to accept all dominant and ruling
facts^ without hoping or endeavouring to modify
them. Where circumstances had produced a repub-
lican form of government, the men of that day were
republicans; where despotism existed, they were its
submissive slaves, indifferent to progress. And both
under the republican and tyrannic governments, the
human family was everywhere divided, either into
four castes, as in the East, or into two (the free citi-
zens and the slaves), as in Greece. This division
into castes, and the doctrine of the two natures of
men, were accepted by all, even by the most power-
ful intellects of the Greek world, Plato and Aristotle.
The emancipation of your class would have been an
impossibility among such men as these.
The men who, with the word of Christ upon their
lips, founded a Religion superior to paganism or the
religions of the East, had but dimly foreseen, not
grasped or assimilated, the sacred idea contained in
78 THE DUTIES OF MAN.
this word Progress. They understood the idea of the
unity of the human race, and the unity of the Law;
they understood the idea of the perfectibility of man,
but they did not comprehend that God has given
man the power of realizing it by his own efforts, nor
the mode by which it has to be achieved. They also
limited themselves to deducing the rule of life from
the contemplation of the individual. Humanity, as
a collective being, remained unknown to them.
They comprehended the idea of a Providence, and
substituted it for the Fatality of the ancients; but in
this Providence they saw only the protector of the
individual, not the law of Humanity. Finding them-
selves placed between the immense ideal of perfecti-
bility they had faintly conceived, and the poor, brief
life of the individual, they felt the necessity of an in-
termediate term or link between man and God; but,
not having reached the idea of collective Humanity,
they had recourse to that of a divine incarnation, and
declared faith in this dogma to be the sole source of
strength, of salvation, of grace to men.
Not suspecting the continuous Revelation trans-
mitted from God to man, through Humanity, they
believed in a unique, immediate Revelation, vouch-
safed at a particular time, and by a special favor of
God. They perceived the link that unites man with
his Creator, but they perceived not the link that
unites all men, past, present, and future, in Humanity
on earth.
The sequence of generations being of little moment
to those who comprehended nothing of the action of
one genenation on another, they accustomed them-
selves to disregard it. They endeavoured to detach
DUTIES TOWARDS YOURSELVES. • 79
man from the earth, from all that regarded Human-
ity at large, and ended by regarding the earth itself
(which they abandoned to the existing powers, and
deemed a mere sojourn of expiation) as in antago-
nism to that Heaven to which man might, by the
help of faith and grace, ascend, but from which all
wanting in faith and grace were exiled.
Believing Revelation to have been immediate and
unique at a given period, they thence deduced the
impossibility of all addition thereunto, and the conse-
quent infallibility of its depositaries. They forgot
that the Founder of their religion had come, not to
destroy the law, but to add to and continue it: they
forgot the solemn occasion when, with a sublime in-
tuition of the future, Jesus declared ** that He had
man} things yet to say, but men could not bear them
then, but after Him would come the Spirit of Truth,
who would speak not of himself, but whatsoever he
should hear, that he should speak" (St John, xvi.
7, 12, 13, 25, et passim)^ words prophetic of the idea of
Progress, of collective inspiration, and of the con-
tinuous revelation of the truth through the medium
of Humanity.
The whole edifice of the Faith that succeeded pa-
ganism is founded on the bases I have described. It
is clear that your earthly emancipation cannot be
founded upon these bases alone.
Thirteen hundred years after the above sublime
words of Jesus were spoken, a man, an Italian, the
greatest of Italians, wrote the following truths:
" God is one. The Universe is a Thought of God;
the Universe, therefore, is also One. All things
spring from God. All things participate in the
8o THE DUTIES OF MAN.
Divine nature, more or less, according to the end for
which they are created. Man is the noblest of cre-
ated things. God has given to man more of His own
nature than to the others. Everything that springs
from God tends towards that amount of perfecti-
bility of which it is susceptible. The capacity of
perfectibility is indefinite in man. Humanity is One.
God has created no useless thing. Humanity exists;
hence there must be a single aim for all men, a work
to be achieved by all. The human race must, there-
fore, work in unity, so that all the intellectual forces
diffused among men may obtain the highest possible
development in the sphere of thought and action.
There exists, therefore, one Universal Religion for
the human race."
The man who wrote these words was called Dante.
Every city of Italy, when Italy shall be free, is bound
to raise a monument to his memory, for these ideas
contain the germ of the Religion of the Future. He
wrote thus in Latin and i.\ Italian, in two books, en-
titled Dg Monarchia and // Convito^ works difficult of
comprehension, and neglected at the present day
even by the literary men of his own country. But
ideas, once sown in the intellectual world, never die.
Others reap and gather them up, even while forget-
ting whence they sprang. All men admire the oak,
but who thinks of the acorn from which it grew?
The germ planted by Dante struck root, was fecun-
dated from time to time by some powerful intellect,
and the tree bore fruit towards the close of the last
century. The idea of Progress as the Law of Life,
accepted, developed, and verified by history and con-
firmed by science, became the banner of the future.
DUTIES TOWARDS YOURSELVES. 8l
At the present day there is no earnest thinker with
whom it is not the cardinal point of his labour and
endeavour.
We now know that the Law of life is PROGRESS /
— progress for the individual, progress for Humanity.^
Humanity fulfills the law on earth: the individual,
on earth and elsewhere.
One sole God, one sole Law. That Law has been,
is, and will be, gradually but inevitably fulfilled by
Humanity from the first moment of its existence.
Truth does not manifest itself suddenly, nor entire.
A continuous Revelation, from epo(:h to epoch,
makes manifest to man a fragment of the truth, a
word of the Law.
The discovery of every one of these words modifies
human life by a sensible advance on the path of im-
provement, and constitutes a belief y a Faith.
The development of the Religious Idea is, then, in-
definitely progressive, and successive beliefs, each
one developing and purifying that Idea, contribute,
like the columns of a temple, to build up the Pan-
theon of Humanity, the one grand, sole Religion of
our earth.
The men most blessed by God with genius and
virtue are its Apostles; the People — the collective
sense of Humanity — its Interpreter; accepting the
revelation of the truth, transmitting it from genera-
tion to generation, and reducing it to practice by
applying it to the different branches and manifesta-
tions of human life.
" Humanity is as a man who lives and learns for-
ever."
Therefore there is not, there cannot be^ infallibility
6
82 THE DUTIES OF MAN.
either in man or Powers; there is not, there cannot
be, any privileged caste of depositaries or interpreters
of the Law; there is not, there cannot be, need of any
interpreter between God and man, save Humanity.
God, by ordaining the accomplishment of a Provi-
dential design of progressive education for Human-
ity, and infusing the instinct of progress into the
heart of every man, granted to human nature the
capacity and the power to fulfill that design.
Individual man, a free and responsible creature, is
able to use or abuse the faculties given to him, in
proportion as he follows the path of duty or yields
to the seductions of a blind selfishness. He may thus
delay or accelerate his own progress, but the Provi-
dential design can be cancelled by no human means.
The education of Humanity must be completed.
Thus do we see even the barbarian invasions, which
from time to time threaten to extinguish the existing
civilization, result in a new civilization, superior to
the former and diffused over a wider zone, and ev.en
individual tyranny subsequently produce a more
rapid and vigourous growth of liberty.
Progress, the Law, will be fulfilled on earth even
as elsewhere.
There is no antagonism between earth and heaven,
and it is blasphemous to imagine that God's earth,
the Home He has given us, may be by us despised
and abandoned to the influence of evil, selfishness, or
tyranny, without sin.
The earth is no sojourn of expiation. It is the
home wherein we are to strive towards the realiza-
tion of that ideal of the true and just of which each
man has in his own soul the germ. It is the ladder
iJlJTiES TOWARDS YOURSELVES. 83
towards that condition of Perfection which we can
only reach by glorifying God in Humanity, through
our own works, and by consecrating ourselves to
realize in action all that we may of His design. The
Judgment that will be held on each of us, and that
will either decree our ascent one step on the ladder
of Perfection, or doom us mournfully to pursue again
the stage already trod, will be founded on the amount
of good done to our brothers, on the degree of prog-
ress to which we have aided them to ascend.
Association^ ever more intimate and more extended,
with our fellow-men, is the means by which our
strength will be multiplied; the field wherein we ful-
fill our duties and reduce the Law of Progress to
action. We must strive to make of Humanity one
single family, every member of which shall be him-
self a reflection of the moral law, for the benefit of the
others. And as the gradual perfection of Humanity
is accomplished from epoch to epoch, from generation
to generation, so the perfection of the individual is
wrought out from existence to existence, more or less
rapidly in proportion to our own labour and effort.
These are some of the truths contained in that
word Progress, from which the Religion of the Future
will spring. In its name only can your emancipation
be achieved.
v
CHAPTER VIIL
LIBERTY.
You live. The life that is in you is not the work of
chance; the word chance is void of meaning, and was
invented to express the ignorance of mankind in cer-
tain things. The life which is in you comes from
God, and in its progressive development it reveals an
intelligent design. Your life, then, has necessarily a
scope, an aim.
The ultimate aim for which we were created is still
unknown to us; it cannot be otherwise; but this is no
reason why we should deny its existence. Does the
infant know the aim toward which it must tend
through the Family, the Country, and Humanity?
No; but this aim exists, and we are beginning to
comprehend it for him. Humanity is the infant of
God: He knows the end and aim towards which it
must develop itself.
Humanity is only now beginning to understand
that Progress is the Law. It is beginning vaguely to
comprehend somewhat of the universe by which it is
surrounded: but the majority of the individuals that
compose it are still incapable, through barbarism,
slavery, or the absolute absence of all education, of
studying that Law and obtaining a knowledge of that
universe, both of which it is necessary to compre-
hend before we can trulv kno^v ourselves
LIBERTY. 85
Only a minority of the men who people our little
Europe are as yet capable of developing themselves
towards the right use and understanding of their
own intellectual faculties.
Amongst yourselves, deprived as the greater num-
ber of you are of instruction, and bowed down beneath
the necessity of an ill-organized physical labour,
those faculties lie dormant, and are unable to bring
their tribute to raise the pyramid of science. How,
then, should we pretend as yet to understand that
which will require the associate labour of the whole ?
Wherefore rebel against our not having already
achieved that which will constitute the last stage of
Progress, while, few in number, and still disunited,
we are but learning to lisp its sacred name ?
Let us resign ourselves, then, to our ignorance of
those things which must yet a long while remain in-
accessible to us, and let us not in childish anger
abandon the study of the truths we may discover.
Impatience and human pride have destroyed or mis-
led more souls than deliberate wickedness. This is
the truth which the ancients sought to express when
they told us how the despot who strove to scale the
heavens succeeded only in building a Babel of confu-
sion, and how the giants who attacked Olympus
were cast down by thunderbolts, and buried beneath
our volcanic mountains.
That of which it is important to be convinced is
this, that whatever be the end and aim towards which
we are created, we can only reach it through the
progressive development and exercise of our intellec-
tual faculties. Our faculties are the instruments of
labour given to us by God. It is, therefore, a neces-
86 THE DUTIES OF MAN.
sity that their development be aided and promoted,
and their exercise protected and free.
Without liberty you cannot fulfill any <3f your
duties. Therefore have you a right to liberty, and a
duty to wrest it at all risks from whatever power
shall seek to withhold it.
Without liberty there is no true morality, because
if there be not free choice between gbod and evil,
between devotion to the common progress and the
spirit of selfishness, there can be no responsibility
Without liberty there is no true society, because
association between free men and slaves is impos-
sible; there can only exist the rule of the one over
the others.
Liberty is sacred, as the individual, of whose life it
is the reflex, is sacred. Where liberty is not, life is
reduced to a mere organic function, and when man
allows the violation of his liberty, he is false to his
own nature, and rebels against the decree of God.
There is no true liberty whenever a caste, a family,
or a man, assumes to rule over others in virtue of a
pretended right divine, or from any privilege of birth
or riches. Liberty must be for all men, and in rela-
tion to all other men.
God does not delegate the sovereign power to any
individual. That degree of sovereign power which
can be justly represented on this earth, has been en-
trusted by God to Humanity, to the Nations, to So-
ciety. And even that ceases, and is withdrawn from
those collective fractions of Humanity, whensoever
they cease to wield it for good, and in accordance
with the Providential design. The sovereign rule
therefore exists of right in none, the true sovereignty
LIBERTY. 87
being in the aitfty and in those acts which bring us
nearer to that. These acts, and the aim towards
which we are advancing, must be submitted to the
judgment of all. There is not, therefore, there can-
not be, any permanent sovereignty.
The institution which we term Government is
merely a Management^ a mission confided to a few in
order more speedily to attain the national intent or
Aim; and should that mission be betrayed, the power
of management confided to those few must cease.
Every man called to the Government is an admin-
istrator of the common Thought. He should be
elected, and be subject to have his election revoked
whensoever he misconceives or deliberately opposes
that Thought.
Therefore, I repeat, there can exist neither family
nor caste possessing the governing power in its own
right, without a violation of your liberty. How
could you call yourselves free, in the presence of men
possessing the power to command you without your
consent? The Republic is, then, the only logical and ^
truly legitimate form of Government.
You have no master save God in Heaven, and the
People on earth. Whensoever you discover a line of
the Law, of the will of God, you are bound to bless
and obey it. Whensoever the people, the collective
Unity of your brother-men, shall declare that such is /
their belief, you are bound to bow your head, and ab- ^
stain from any act of rebellion. But there are certain
things constituting your own individuality, and
which are essential elements of human life. Over
these not even the People has any right. No major-
ity may. decree tyranny, or destroy or alienate its own
88 THE DUTIES OF MAN,
freedom. You cannot employ force against the People
that should commit this suicidal act, but there exists
and lives eternally in each of you a right of protest,
in the manner circumstances may suggest.
You must have liberty in all that is indispensable
to the moral and material aliment of life; personal
liberty, liberty of locomotion, liberty of religious
faith; liberty of opinion upon all subjects, liberty of
expressing that opinion through the Press, or by any
other peaceful means; liberty of association in order
to render that opinion fruitful by cultivation, and by
contact with the thoughts and opinions of others;
liberty of labour, and of trade and commerce with its
produce; all these are things which may not be taken
from you (save in a few exceptional cases which it is
unnecessary here to enumerate) without your having
a right to protest.
No one has any right to imprison you, or subject you
to personal espionage or restraint in the name of
society, v ithout telling you wherefore, celling it you
with the least possible delay, and immediately con-
ducting you before the judicial power of the country.
No one has any right of persecution, intolerance, or
exclusive legislation as to your religious opinion: no
voice, save the grand, peaceful voice of Humanity,
has any right to interpose itself between God and
your conscience.
God has given you the faculty of thought: no one
has a right to suppress or restrain its expression,
which is the act of communion 'between your soul
and the souis of your brother-men, and is our one
sole means of progress.
The Press must be absolutely free. The rights of
LIBERTY. 89
intellect are inviolable, and every preventive censor-
ship is tyranny. Society may, however, punish the
errors of the Press, or the teaching of crime or im-
morality, just as it may punish any other description
of error. This right of punishment (decreed in vir-
tue of a solemn public judgment) is a consequence
of our human responsibility; but every anterior inter-
vention is a negation of liberty.
The right of peaceful association is as sacred as
thought itself. God gave us the tendency to associa-
tion as a perennial means of progress, and as a pledge
of that Unity which the human family is destined
one day to attain.
No power, then, has a right to limit or impede
association
It is the duty of each of you to employ the life
given him by God; to preserve it and to develop it:
each of you, then, is bound to labour, as the sole
means of its material support. Labour is sacred.
No one has a right to impede it, forbid it, or render
it impossible by arbitrary regulations. No one has
any right to forbid free trade in its productions.
Your country is your lawful market, which no one
may limit or restrain.
But when all these various forms of liberty shall
be held sacred, when the State shall be constituted
according to the universal will, and in such wise that
each individual shall have every path towards the
free development of his faculties thrown open before
him, — forget not that high above each and every in-
dividual stands the intent and Aim which it is your
duty to achieve, your own moral perfectibility and
that of others, through an ever more intimate and
90 THE DUTIES OF MAN.
extended communion between all the members of
the human family, so that the day may come when
all shall recognize one sole Law.
" Your task is to found the Universal Family, to
build up the City of God, and unremittingly to la-
bour towards the active, progressive fulfillment of
His great work in Humanity.
" When each of you, loving all men as brothers,
shall reciprocally act like brothers; when each of
you, seeking his own well-being in the well-being of
all, shall identify his own life with the life of all, and
his own interest with the interest of all; when each
shall be ever ready to sacrifice himself for all the
members of the Common Family, equally ready to
sacrifice themselves for him; most of the evils which
now weigh upon the human race will disappear, as
the gathering vapours of the horizon vanish on the
rising of the sun; and the will of God will be ful-
filled, for it is His will that love shall gradually unite
the scattered members of Humanity and organize
them into a single whole, so that Humanity may be
one, even as He is One." *
Let not these words, the words of a man whose
life and death were holy, and who loved the people
and their future with an immense love, ever be for- .'
gotten by you, my brothers. Liberty is but a means, yj
Woe unto you and to your future, should you ever
accustom yourselves to regard it as the end/ Your
own individuality has its rights and duties, which
may not be yielded up to any, but woe unto you
and to your future, should the respect you owe unto
? {.aiDmenais, Livre du People, HI,
LIBERTY. 91
that which constitutes your individual life ever de-
generate into the fatal crime of selfishness.
Liberty is not the negation of all authority: it is
the negation of every authority that fails to represent
the Collective Aim of the nation, or that presumes to
impose or maintain itself upon any other basis than
that of your free consent.
In these later days the sacred idea of liberty has
been perverted by sophistical doctrines. Some have
reduced it to a narrow and immoral egoism; have
made j^^/" everything, and have declared the aim of
all social organization to be the satisfaction of its de-
sires. Others have declared that all government and
all authority are necessary evils, to be restricted and
restrained as far as possible; that liberty has no
limit, and that the aim of all society is that of indefi-
nitely promoting liberty, which man has the right
of using or abusing, provided his doing so result in
no direct evil to others, and that government has no
other mission than that of preventing one individual
from injuring another.
Reject these false doctrines, my brothers! The
first has generated the selfishness of class; the second
makes of society — which, well organized, would be
the representation of your collective life and aim —
naught better than the soldier or police officer com-
missioned to maintain an external and apparent peace.
The tendency of all such doctrines is to convert
liberty into anarchy; to cancel the idea of collective
moral improvement, and that mission of Progress,
which society ought to assume. If you should un-
derstand liberty thus, you would deserve to lose it,
and 3goner or later you wguld lose it.
y
92 THE DUTIES OF MAN.
Your liberty will be sacred so long as it is governed
by and evolved beneath an idea of duty, of faith in
the common perfectibility.
Your liberty will flourish, protected by God and
man, as long as you hold it — not as the right to use
or abuse your faculties in the direction it may please
you to select — but as the right of free choice, accord-
ing to your separate tendencies, of the means of do-
ing good.
CHAPTER IX.
EDUCATION.
God has created you susceptible of education.
Therefore it is your duty to educate yourselves as far
as lies in your power, and it is your right that the so-
ciety to which you belong shall not impede your edu-
cation, but assist you in it, and supply you with the
means thereof when you have them not.
Your liberty, your rights, ydur emancipation from
every injustice in your social position, the task which
each of you is bound to fulfill on earth — all these de-
pend upon the degree of education you are able to
attain.
Without education you are incapable of rightly
choosing between good and evil; you cannot acquire
a true knowledge of your rights; you cannot attain
that participation in political life without which your
complete social emancipation is impossible ; you
cannot arrive at a correct definition and comprehen-
sion of your own mission.
Education is the bread of your soul. Without it
your faculties lie dormant and unfruitful, even as the
vital power lies sterile in the seed cast into untilled
soil and deprived of the benefits of irrigation and the
watchful labour of the agriculturist.
^ At the present day your class is either uneducated
94 THE DUTIES OF MAl^.
or receives its education at the hands of men or gov-
ernments, who, having no ruling principles to guide
them, necessarily mutilate or misdirect it. Present
directors of education imagine that they have fulfilled
their duties towards you when they have opened a
certain number of schools — distributed unequally
over the territory they govern — wherein your chil-
dren may receive a certain degree of elementary in-
struction, consisting principally of reading, writing,
and arithmetic.
Such teaching is properly called instruction^ and it
differs and is as distinct from true education as the
various organs of our existence differ and are dis-
tinct from our life. The organs of existence are not
our life. They are the mere instruments of our life
and its means of manifestation; they neither govern
nor direct it; they are equally the manifestation of
the holiest or the most corrupt life; and just so does
instruction provide the means of putting in practice
that which is taught by education, but it can never
take the place of education.
Education addresses itself to the moral faculties;
instruction to the intellectual. The first develops
in man the knowledge of his duties; the second gives
him the capacity of achieving them. Without in-
struction, education would be too often inefficient;
without education, instruction is a lever deprived of
its fulcrum.
You know how to read. What avails this knowl-
edge if you are unfit to judge between the books
containing error and those containing truth? You
have learned to communicate your thoughts to your
fellow-men in writing. What avails this knowledge,
EDUCATION. 95
if your thoughts are the mere reflex of your own
selfishness ?
Instruction, like wealth, is either a source of good
or of evil, according to the manner and motive of its
use. Consecrated to aid the progress of all, it is a
means of civilization and of liberty; turned to more
personal uses, it becomes an agent of tyranny and
corruption.
In Europe at the present day, instruction, unac-
companied by a corresponding degree of moral educa-
tion, is too often a serious evil; it assists in maintain-
ing inequality between class and class of the same
people, leads men to false doctrines, and produces a
spirit of calculation, of selfishness, and of compromise
between the just and the unjust.
The distinction between those who offer you more
or less of instruction and those who preach educa-
tion, is more important than you are aware of, and
deserves to be spoken of at some length.
The camp of the liberal party in Europe at the
present day is split up into two schools of doctrine.
The first of these schools proclaims the sovereignty
of the Individual. The second declares that sov-
ereignty belongs to Society alone, and makes the
manifest consent of the majority its law.
The first imagines that it has fulfilled its mission
when it has proclaimed the rights believed to be in-
herent in human nature, and preserved liberty. The
second looks almost exclusively to association^ and
from the Social Pact that constitutes that association
it deduces the duties of each individual.
The first does not go beyond what I have termed
instruction, for instruction does in fact tend to
96 THE DUTIES OF MAN.
develop the individual faculties, without direction
or rule. The second understands the necessity of
education, and regards it as the manifestation of the
social programme.
The first inevitably tends to moral anarchy. The
second, unmindful of liberty, runs the risk of uphold-
ing despotism — the despotism of the majority.
To the first of these schools belonged that genera-
tion of men known in France as Doctrinaires^ who be-
trayed the hopes of the people after the revolution of
1830, and who, by proclaiming Liberty of Instruction,
and nothing more, perpetuated the monopoly of gov-
ernment in the hands of the bourgeois class, who did
possess the means of developing their individual
faculties. The second, unfortunately, is only repre-
sented at the present day by Powers or sects belong-
ing to antiquated creeds or beliefs, and hostile to the
dogma of the future, which is Progress.
Both of these schools are defective. The tendency
of both is narrow and exclusive.
The following is the truth:
All Sovereignty is in God, in the moral law, in the
Providential design — which rules the world, and is
from time to time revealed to Humanity, in different
epochs of its existence, by virtuous Genius — in the
Aim we have to reach, in the Mission we have to fulfill.
Sovereignty cannot exist in the individual, nor in
Society, except in so far as one or the other acts in
accordance with that design and law, and tends to-
wards that aim.
The individual ruler is either the best interpreter
of that Law, and governs in its name, or he is a
usurper to be overthrown.
EDUCATION. 97
There is no legitimate sovereignty in the mere
<vill of the majority, if it be contrary to the supreme
moral law or deliberately close the path of future
progress.
The Social Weal, Liberty, and Progress: there can /
be no real sovereignty beyond these three terms.
Education teaches in what the social weal consists.
Instruction assures to the individual a free choice
of the means of securing a continuous advance in the
conception of the social weal.
That which is most important for you is that your
children be taught what are the ruling principles and
beliefs directing the life of their fellow-men during
the span of existence allotted to them on earth ; what
the moral, social, and political programme of their
nation ; what the spirit of the legislation by which
their actions will be judged ; what the degree of
progress already achieved by Humanity; what the
goal it is destined to attain.
And it is important that they should be taught in ^
their earliest years a spirit of equality and love, which \j
links them in a common aim with the millions, the
brothers given them by God.
The education that will afford your children such teach-
ing as this J can only be given them by the nation.
At present their moral teaching is a mere anarchy.
Left exclusively to the parents, it isnullin those cases
where poverty and the necessity of constant material
labour deprive them alike of the knowledge and time
required to enable them to teach their children them-
selves and of the means of providing other instruct-
ors; it is evil in those cases where selfishness and cor-
ruption have perverted or contaminated the family.
7
98 THE DUTIES OF MAN.
Even where parents have the means of providing in.
struction for their children, they are too often brought
up in materialism, or superstition; in ideas of mere
liberty, or passive resignation; of aristocracy, or mere
reaction against it, according to the character of the
instructor — priestly or secular — whom the parents
celect. How can such education in childhood fit men
to work together in harmony and fraternity towards
a common aim, and to represent in their own persons
the unity of the country?
Society calls upon them to promote the develop-
ment of a common idea in which they have not been
instructed. Society punishes them for the violation
of laws of which they were left in ignorance, the
scope and spirit of which society has never taught
them. Society requires from them cooperation and
sacrifice for an aim which no teachers have explained
to them at the outset of their civil life.
Strange to say, the Doctrinaire School of which I
have already spoken recognizes the right of each
separate individual to rule and teach the young, and
does not admit the same right in the association of
individuals, the Nation. Their cry of liberty of in-
struction disinherits the Nation of all moral direction.
They proclaim the importance of unity in the mone-
tary system, and the system of weights and measun^-s;
but that unity of Principle, upon which all national
life should be founded and developed, is nothing to
them.
Without a national education, the Nation has no
I moral existence, for upon it alone can a national con-
science be formed.
Without a national education — common to all the
EDUCATION. 99
citizens — all equality of rights and duties is an un-
meaning formula, for all knowledge of duties, and
all capacity for the exercise of rights, are left to the
chances of fortune, or the arbitrary choice of those
who select the teacher.
The opponents of unity of education invoke liberty
in their support. The liberty of whom? Of the
fathers, or of the children? In their system the
moral liberty of the children is violated by the des-
potism of the father; the liberty of the young gene-
ration is sacrificed to the old; and liberty of progress
is rendered an illusion.
Individual opinions and beliefs — false, it may be,
and adverse to progress — are alone transmitted with all
the authority of the father to the son, at an age when
their examination is impossible. As they advance in
life the position of the majority among you, and the
necessity of occupying every hour in material em-
ployment, will prevent the mind already stamped
and impressed with those opinions and beliefs, from
modifying them by comparison with others.
In the name of this false liberty the anarchical
system I have described tends to perpetuate that
worst of despotisms, a moral caste.
This system, in fact, produces a form of despotism,
not liberty. True liberty cannot exist without equal-
ity, and equality can only exist among those who
start from a common ground, a common principle,
and a uniform consciousness and knowledge of duty.
Liberty can only rightly be exercised as a conse-
quence of that knowledge.
I said a few pages back, that true liberty is not the
right to choose evil, but the right of choice between
106 THE DUTIES OF MAM.
the various paths that lead to good. The liberty in-
voked by these shallow philosophers is, in fact, an
arbitrary right given to the father to choose the
wrong for his child. What! If a father should
threaten to mutilate or in any way injure the body of
his child, Society would interfere, called on and in-
voked by all; and shall the soul of that child be of
less worth than the body? Shall not Society inter-
fere to protect him from the mutilation of his facul-
ties, from ignorance, from the perversion of his moral
sense, from superstition?
The cry of Liberty of Instruction was of use in the
day when it first arose, and it is useful even now in
all countries where moral education is the monopoly
of a despotic government, a retrograde caste, or a
priesthood, the nature of whose dogma renders it
antagonistic to progress. That cry was a cry of
emancipation, imperfect, but indispensable and neces-
sary at the time.
But I speak to you of a time in wliich Religion
shall inscribe the word Progress over the portal of
the Temple; when all your institutions shall be so
many repetitions of that word in various forms, and
when a National education shall be given to the
people which will conclude its teachings to its pupils
with these words:
"To you, as beings destined to live under a com-
mon Pact with ourselves, we have now declared the
fundamental basis of that Pact; the Principles in
which your Nation believes at the present day; but
remember that the first of these principles is Prog-
ress; remember that your mission, both as a man and
a citizen, is to improve, as far as you may, the minds
EDUCATION. lOI
and hearts of your fellow-men. Go; examine and
compare; and if you discover a truth superior to that
which we believe ourselves to possess, diffuse it free-
ly, and the blessing of your country be with you."
Then, though not before, you may renounce the
cry of liberty of instruction as inferior to your need,
and fatal to the unity of the country; then you may
ask — nay, exact — the foundation of a system of
gratuitous National Education, obligatory upon all.
The Nation is bound to transmit its programme to
every citizen. Every citizen should receive in the A
national schools di moral education, a course of nation- V
d5//Vy— comprising a summary view of the progress of
Humanity and of the history of his own country; a
popular exposition of the principles directing the
legislation of that country, and the elementary in-
struction about which we are all agreed. Every citi-
zen should be taught in these schools the lesson of
equality and love.
The National Programme once transmitted to all
the citizens, liberty resumes its rights. Not only
family education, but every other is sacred. Every
man has an unlimited right to communicate his ideas
to his fellow-men; every man has a right to hear
them. Society should encourage and promote the
free utterance of thought in every shape, and open
every path to the modification and development of
the National Programme.
CHAPTER X.
ASSOCIATION. PROGRESS.
God has created you social and progressive beings.
It is therefore your duty to associate yourselves, and
to progress as far as the sphere of activity in which
circumstances have placed you, will permit. You
ha\e a right to demand that the society to which
you belong shall in no way impede your work of
association and progress, but, on the contrary, shall
assist you, and furnish you with the means of asso-
ciation and progress of which you stand in need.
•Liberty gives you the power of choosing between
J good and evil; that is to say, between duty and
selfishness. Education will teach you to choose
rightly. Association will give you the means of re-
ducing your choice to action. Progress, the Aim by
which you must be guided in your choice, is, at the
same time, when visibly achieved, the proof that your
choice was not mistaken. Whenever anyone of these
conditions is neglected or betrayed, the man and the
citizen do not exist, or exist in a state of imperfection
and impeded development.
You have therefore to strive to realize all these
conditions, and above all, the right of association;
without which both liberty and education are use-
less.
ASSOCIATION. PROGRESS. 103
The right of association is as sacred as Religion
itself, which is the association of souls. You are all
the sons of God; you are therefore brothers. Who,
then, may without guilt set limits to association, the
communion among brothers ?
This word communion^ which I have written advis-
edly, was taught us by Christianity, which the men
of the past declared to be an immutable religion, but
which is, in fact, a step in the scale of the religious
manifestations of Humanity.
And it is a sacred word. It taught mankind that
they were a single family of equals before God, and
united master and servant in a single thought of sal-
vation, of love, and of hope in Heaven. It was an
immense advance upon the preceding ages, when both
philosophers and people believed the souls of citi-
zens and the souls of slaves to be of different nature
and race. And this mission alone would have suf-
ficed to stamp the greatness of Christianity. The
communion was the symbol of the equality and
fraternity of souls, and it rested with Humanity to
amplify and develop the truth hidden under that
symbol.
The Church did not and could not do this. Timid
and uncertain in the beginning, and allied with the
nobles and the Temporal Powers in the sequel, im-
bued, from self-interest, with an aristocratic ten-
dency which had no existence in the mind of its
founder, the Church wandered out of the true path,
and even receded so far as to diminish the moral
value of the communion, by limiting it in the case of
the laity to a communion in bread alone, and reserv-
ing solely to priests the communion in both species.
I04 THE DUTIES OF MAN.
At that time arose a cry from all that felt within
their souls the right of the whole human family to
the symbols of unlimited communion without dis-
tinction between the laity and ecclesiastics: Commun-
ion in both species for the people; the Cup for the people !
In the fifteenth century that cry became the watch-
word of the aroused multitudes; it was the prelude
to the Religious Reformation, and was sanctified by
martyrdom. A holy man, named John Huss, of Bo-
hemia, who was the leader of that movement, per-
ished in the flames kindled by the Inquisition.
At the present day, most of you are ignorant of the
history of those struggles, or believe them to have
been the quarrels of fanatics about merely theologi-
cal questions. But when a national education shall
have popularized history, and taught you how every
religious progress carries with it a corresponding
progress in civil life, you will appreciate those con-
tests at their true worth, and honor the memory of
those martyrs as your benefactors. We owe it to
those martyrs and their predecessors that we have
learned that there is no privileged class of interpre-
ters between God and the people ; that the best
among us in wisdom and virtue may and ought to
counsel and direct us on the path of improvement,
but without any monopoly of power or supremacy;
and that the right of communion is indeed equal for
all men. That which is holy in Heaven is holy on earth»
and the communion of mankind in God carries with
iv the association of mankind in their terrestrial life.
The religious association of souls carries with it the
association of intellect, and of action which convert?
thought Into reality.
ASSOCIATION. PROGRESS. I05
Consider association, therefore, both your duty and
your right.
There are those who seek to put a limit to the
rights of the citizen, by telling you that the true asso-
ciation is the State, the Nation: that you ought ail to
be members of that association, but that every par-
tial association amongst yourselves, is either adverse
to the State, or superfluous.
But the State, the Nation, only represents the asso-
ciation of the citizens in those matters and in those
tendencies which are common to all the men who
compose it. There are tendencies and aims which do
not embrace all the citizens, but only a certain nuipber
of them. And precisely as the tendencies and the
aims which are common to all, constitute the Nation;
so the tendencies and aims which are common to a
portion of the citizens, should constitute special asso-
ciations.
Moreover — and this.is the fundamental basis of the
right of association — association is a guarantee of
progress. The State represents a certain number or
mass of principles, in which the citizens are agreed at
the time of its foundation. Suppose that a new and
true principle, a new and rational development of the
truths that have given vitality to the State, should be
discovered by a few among its citizens. How shall
they diffuse the knowledge of this principle, except
by association ? Suppose that, in consequence of
scientific discovery, or of new means of communica-
tion opened up between peoples and peoples, or from
any other cause, a new interest should arise amor.g a
certain number of the individuals composing the
State, how shall they who first perceive this, make
Io6 THE DUTIES OF MAN.
their way among the various interests of long stand-
ing, unless by uniting their efforts and their means?
Inertia, and a disposition to rest satisfied with the
order of things long existing and sanctioned by the
common consent, are habits too powerful over the
•ninds of most men to allow a single individual to
overcome them by his solitary work. The associa-
tion of a daily increasing minority can do this. Asso-
ciation is the method of the future. Without it the
State would remain motionless, enchained to the de-
gree of civilization already reached.
.. Association must be progressive in the scope it en-
deavours to attain, and not contrary to those truths
which have been conquered forever by the uni-
versal consent of Humanity and of the Nation. An
association founded for the purpose of facilitat-
ing theft of the property of others ; an association
obliging its members to polygamy; an association
which should preach the dissolution of the Nation or
the establishment of despotism, would be illegal.
The Nation has the right of declaring to its members:
"We cannot tolerate the diffusion among us of doc-
trines in violation of that which constitutes human
nature, morality, or the country. Go forth and es-
tablish amongst yourselves, beyond our frontiers, the
as^sociations which your tendencies suggest."
^ Association must be peaceful. It may not use other
weapons than the apostolate of the spoken and written
word. Its object must be to persuade, not to compel.
^ Association must be public. Secret associations —
which are a legitimate weapon of defence where
there exists neither liberty nor Nation — are illegal,
and ought to be dissolved, wherever liberty and the
/.
ASSOCIATION. PROGRESS. I07
inviolability of thought are rights recognized and
protected by the country. As the scope and in-
tent of association is to open the paths of progress
it must be submitted to the examination and judg-
ment of all.
And, finally, association is bound to respect in others
those rights which spring from the essential characteris-
tics of human nature. An association which, like the
corporations of the Middle Ages, should violate the
rights of labour, or which should tend directly to
restrict liberty of conscience, ought to be repressed
by the government of the Nation.
With these exceptions, liberty of association among
the citizens is as sacred and inviolable as that prog-
ress of which it is the life.
Every government which attempts to restrain it
betrays its social mission, and it becomes the duty of
the people first to admonish it, and — all peaceful
means being exhausted — to overthrow it.
Such, my brothers, are the bases upon which your
duties are founded, the sources from which spring
your rights. An infinite number of questions will
arise in the course of your civil life, which it is no
part of the present work either to foresee, or to assist
you in resolving. My sole aim in this book has been
to present to you, even as torches to light you on
your way, those Principles which should guide you
through them all, and in the earnest application of
which, you will find a method of resolving them for
yourselves.
And this I believe I have done.
I have led you to God, as the source of duty and
pledge of the equality of man: to the Moral Law, as
Io8 THE DUTIES OF MAN.
the source of all civil laws and basis of your every
judgment as to the conduct of those who frame those
laws. I have pointed out to you the People — your-
selves, ourselves, the mass of the citizens compos-
ing the Nation — as the sole interpreter of the law, and
the source of all political power. I have told you that
the fundamental characteristic of the law is Prog-
ress; progress indefinite and continuous from epoch
to epoch; progress in every branch of human activity,
in every manifestation of thought, from leligion
down to industry and to the distribution of wealth.
I have described to you your duties towards Human-
ity, your country, your family, and yourselves. And
I have deduced those duties from those essential
characteristics which constitute the human creature,
and which it is your task to develop.
These characteristics — inviolable in every man —
are: liberty, susceptibility of education, the social
tendency, and the capacity for, and necessity of,
progress. And from these characteristics — without
which there is neither true man nor true citizen possi-
ble — I have deduced, not your duties only, but your
/ rights, and the general character of the government
'■^ you should seek for your country.
Never forget these principles. Watch that they
never be violated. Incarnate them in yourselves.
You will be free, and you will improve.
The task I have undertaken for you would then be
complete, were it not for a tremendous obstacle aris-
ing in the bosom of Society itself (as it is now consti-
tuted), to the possibility of your fulfilling your duties
or exercising your rights.
4/* This obstacle is the inequality of means.
ASSOCIATION. IPROGRESS. IO9
In order to fulfill duties and exercise rights — time,
intellectual development, and the certainty of mate-
rial existence, are necessary.
Now, very many of you do not possess these first
elements of progress. Their life is a constant and
uncertain battle in order to conquer the means of
material existence. For them, the question is not
one of progress^ but of life itself.
There is, then, some deep and radical vice in the
present organization of society. And my work would
be rendered useless were I not to define that vice,
and indicate a method of correcting it.
The economical question will therefore constitute
the last portion of my work.
CHAPTER XI.
THE ECONOMICAL QUESTION.
Many, too many, of you are poor. Life for at least
three-fourths of the working class, whether labourers
or mechanics, is a daily struggle to obtain the indis-
pensable material means of existence. They are occu-
pied in manual labour for ten, twelve, sometimes
fourteen, hours a day, and by this constant, monoto-
nous, and painful industry, they scarcely gain the
bare necessaries of physical existence. The attempt
to teach such men the duty of progress, to speak to
them of their intellectual and moral life, of their
political rights, or of education, is sheer irony in the
present state of things.
They have neither time nor means to improve and
progress. Wearied, worn-out, half -stupefied by a life
consumed in a round of petty and mechanical toil, all
they do learn is a mute, impotent, and often unjust,
rancour against the class of men who employ them.
They too often seek forgetfulness of the troubles of
the day and the uncertainty of the morrow in the
stimulus of strong drink, and sink to rest in places
better described as dens than rooms, to waken to a
repetition of the same dull exercise of their merely
physical powers.
It is a sad condition, and it must be altered.
THE ECONOMICAL QUESTION. HI
You are meuy and as such you possess faculties, not
merely physical, but intellectual and moral: faculties
which it is your duty to develop. You should be
citizens^ and, as such, exercise for the good of all cer-
tain rights, which require a certain degree of educa-
tion and a certain portion of time.
It is clear that you ought to labour less and gain
more than you do now.
Sons of God, all of us, and brethren in Him and
amongst ourselves, we are called to constitute one
sole great Family.
In this family there may exist such inequality as is
he result of diversity of aptitude, of capacity, or of
disposition for labour, but it should be governed by
one single principle: Whosoever is willing to give — for
the benefit of the whole — that amount of labour of which
he is capable y ought to receive such amount of recompense
for that labour as will enable him more or less to develop
his individual life in each of the essential characteristics
by which individual life is defined.
This is the ideal which all of us ought to strive and
study to approach more nearly from age to age.
Every change, every revolution which fails to ad-
vance us one step towards this ideal, which does not
produce a moral and social progress corresponding
to the political progress achieved, which does not re-
sult in one degree of improvement in the material
condition of the poorer classes, violates the Providen-
tial design, and reduces itself to the rank of a mere
war of faction against faction, each seeking illegiti-
mate dominion, and each alike a falsehood and an
evil.
But up to what point can we realize this aim at the
/
112 THE DUTIES OF MAN.
present day ? How, and by what means can we
reach this point ?
Some of the more timid amongst your well-wishers
have sought the remedy in the morality of the work-
ingman himself. They have founded savings-banks
and similar institutions, saying to the operative :
" Bring your wages here ; economize, abstain from
every excess, whether of drink or otherwise; emanci-
pate yourselves from poverty by privation." And
such advice is excellent, in so far as it tends to the
moral improvement of the workingman, without which
all reforms are useless. But it neither solves the
question of poverty itself, nor takes any account of
social duty.
Very few of you can economize your wages. And
all that those few can achieve by their slow accumu-
lation is the possibility of providing, to a certain ex-
tent, for their old age. Now, the economical ques-
tion has more than this in view. Its object is also to
provide for the years of manhood, to develop and ex-
pand ///>, as far as possible, while in its full vigour and
activity, while it may most efficaciously aid the prog-
ress of the country and humanity.
Even with regard to the mere material well-being
of the working class this advice falls short of the aim,
as it does not even hint at any method of increasing
wealth or production. Moreover, society, which
lives by the labour of the sons of the people, and de-
mands from them their tribute of blood in the hour
of danger, incurs a sacred debt towards them in
return.
There are other men, not enemies of the people,
but indifferent to the cry of suffering which bursts
THE ECONOMICAL QUESTION. ii;J
from the hearts of the sons of labour, and fearful of
every great innovation, who belong to the school of
Economists^ and who have worthily and usefully
fought the battle of industry and labour, but without
reflecting that the necessity of Progress and of Asso-
ciation is an ineradicable element of human nature.
This school has maintained, and still — like the
Philanthropists of whom I have spoken — does main-
tain, that every one can^ even in the present state of
things, build up his own independence on his own
activity, that any change in the organization of
labour would be either injurious or superfluous, and
that the formula, Each for himself and liberty for us
ally is sufficient to create, by degrees, an approximate
equilibrium of ease and comfort among the various
classes that constitute society.
Liberty of internal traffic, liberty of commerce
among nations, a progressive reduction of custom
duties (especially upon raw materials), a general
encouragement offered to great industrial enter-
prises, to the multiplication of means of communica-
tion and of all machinery tending to increase activity
of production; these, according to the Economists^ are
all that society can offer for the amelioration of the
position of your class, and any further intervention
on its part would, in their opinion, be a source of
evil.
If this were indeed true, the evil of poverty would
be incurable; but God forbid, my brothers ! that I
should ever give your sufferings and your aspirations
an answer so despairing, atheistic, and immoral.
God has ordained for you a better future than that
offered by the remedies of the Economists.
8
114 '^^^ DUTIES OP MAN.
Their remedies, in fact, merely point to the possi-
ble and temporary increase of the production of
wealth; they do not tend to its more equitable distri-
bution. While the Philanthropists^ regarding indi-
vidual man alone, content themselves with the
endeavour to make him more moral, without seeking
to increase the common prosperity so as to give him
an opportunity of progress ; the Economists think
only of increasing the sources of production, without
occupying themselves with the condition of the indi-
vidual man. Under the exclusive regime of liberty
which they preach, and which has more or less regu
lated the economical world in these later days, the
most irrefutable documentary evidence has shown an
increase of productive activity and of capital, but
not of universally diffused prosperity.
The misery of the working class is unchanged.
Liberty of competition for him who possesses nothing
— for him who, unable to save his daily earnings, can-
not even initiate a competition — is a lie; even as po-
litical liberty is a lie for those who, from want of edu.
cation, instruction, time and material means, are
unable to exercise their rights. Increased facilities
for the exchange and conveyance of the products of
labour would by degrees emancipate labour from the
tyranny of trade and commerce, and from the exist-
ing classes of intermediates between the producer
and the consumer, but they cannot emancipate
it from the tyranny of capital ; they cannot
give the means of labour to him who has them
lot.
And from the want of an equal distribution of
wealth, and of a just division of products, coml)ined
THE ECONOMICAL QUESTaON II5
with the progressive increase of the number of con-
sumers, capital itself is turned aside from its true
economic aim, and becomes in part stationary in the
hands of a few, instead of spreading and circulating;
or it is directed towards the production of objects of
superfluity, luxury, and fictitious wants, instead of
being concentrated on the production of objects
of primary necessity to life, and is risked in perilous,
and, too often, immoral speculations.
At the present day — and this is the curse of our
actual social economy — capital is the tyrant of labour.
Society is at present composed — economically speak-
ing — of three classes: that is to say, of capitalists^ be-
ing the possessors of the means and implements of
labour, of land, of factories, ready money, and raw
material; of middlemeny chiefs and organizers of labour,
and dealers, who are, or ought to be, the representa-
tives of the intellectual side; and of operatives^ who
represent the material side of labour.
The first of these three classes is sole master of the
field, and is in a position to promote, accelerate, de-
lay, or direct labour towards certain special aims at
will. And the share of this class of the results of
labour and the value of production is comparatively
settled and defined; the location of the instruments
of labour is variable only within certain known and
definite limits; and even time itself may be said to be,
to some extent, in their power, as they are removed
from the pressure of immediate want.
The share of the second class is uncertain. It de-
pends upon their intellect, their activity, and, above
all, on circumstances, such as the greater or less
development of competition and the flux and reflux
tl6 THE DUTIES OF* MAM.
of capital, which is regulated by events not within
the reach of their calculations.
The workman's share consists simply of his wages,
determined previously to the execution of the work,
and without regard to the greater or less profits of
the undertaking; and the limits within which those
wages vary are determined by the relation that ex-
ists between the supply and demand, or, in othei
words, between the population of operatives and
capital.
Now, as the first constantly tends to increase, and
to an increase generally superior (however slightly)
to the increase of the second, the tendency of wages,
where no other causes intervene, is, of course, to
decrease.
Time, also, is altogether beyond the power of the
workingman. Financial and political crises, the sud-
den application of new machinery to the different
branches of industrial activity, the irregularities of
production, and its frequent excess and accumulation
in a given direction (an evil inseparable from partially
enlightened competition), the unequal distribution of
the working classes upon certain points, or in certain
branches of activity, and a hundred other causes
tending to the interruption of labour, take from the
operative all free choice as to his own condition. On
the one side he sees absolute starvation, on the other
the necessity of accepting whatever terms are offered
to him.
Such a state of things, I repeat, indicates the germ
of a moral evil which must be cured.
The remedies proposed both by the Philanthropists
and Economists are unequal to this task.
THE ECONOMICAL QUESTION. 1 17
And, nevertheless, there is progress in the class to
which you belong; a progress historical and continu-
ous, and which has overcome still greater difficul-
ties.
You were first slaves^ then serfs; now you are
hirelings. You have emancipated yourselves from
slavery and from serfdom. Why should you not
emancipate yourselves from the yoke of hire, and
become free producers, and masters of the totality of
production which you create ?
Wherefore should you not accomplish, through
your own peaceful endeavours and the assistance of a
society having sacred duties towards each of its mem-
bers, the most beautiful Revolution that can be con-
ceived — a revolution which, accepting labour as the
commercial basis of human intercourse, and the
fruits of labour as the basis of property, should grad-
ually abolish the class distinctions, the tyrannical
dominion of one element of labour over another, and
by proclaiming one sole law of just equilibrium
between production and consumption, harmonize
and unite all the children of the Country, the com-
mon mother ?
Owing principally to the teachings of the republi-
can party, the sense of a social duty towards the sons
of labour — the earnest of a better future for the peo-
ple — had gradually been awakened in Europe dur-
ing the last thirty years, when certain schools arose
(in France especially), composed for the most part of
well-meaning and sincere friends of the people, but
led astray by an over weaning love of system -making,
and by individual vanity.
These schools introduced certain exclusive and ex-
Il8 THE DUTIES OF MAN.
aggerated doctrines under the name of Socialism — doc-
trines frequently antagonistic to the wealth already
acquired by other classes, as well as economically im-
possible. By terrifying the multitude of smaller shop-
keepers, and creating a sense of distrust between the
different classes of citizens, they caused the social
question to recede, and split up the republican party
into two separate camps.
I cannot now pause to examine these different
schools one by one. They were called Saint Simon-
ianism, Fourierism, Communism, etc., etc. Nearly
all of them were based upon ideas good in them-
selves, and long accepted by all who belonged to the
creed of Progress, but they spoiled or nullified these
ideas by the erroneous and tyrannical methods by
which they proposed to apply and reduce them to
practice. And it is necessary that I should briefly
point out to you wherein their errors consisted, be-
cause the promises held out to the people by these
systems are so magnificent as to be likely to seduce
your approval, and you would run the risk, by accept-
ing them, of retarding your emancipation, which is
inevitable in a not far distant future.
It is true — and this fact alone should awaken a
strong sense of doubt in your minds — that when cir-
cumstances had placed some of the authors of these
systems in power, they never attempted to realize
their own doctrines in practice. Giants on paper,
they dwindled and shrank before the difficulties of
the practical reality.
If, at some future day, you examine these various
systems with attention — bearing in mind the funda-
mental ideas I have hitherto pointed out to you, and
THE ECONOMICAL QUESTION. II9
the indestructible characteristics of human nature,
you will find that they all of them violate some of
these characteristics, as well as the law of progress,
and the method of its accomplishment through Hu-
manity.
Progress is accomplished through laws which no
human power can break. It is accomplished step by
step, by the perpetual development and modification of
the elements which manifest the activity of life.
In certain epochs, in certain countries, and under
the influence of certain errors or prejudices, men
have frequently given the name of essential elements
and characteristics of social life to things which have
no root in nature, but only in the conventional cus-
toms of an erring society — customs which disap-
peared at the expiration of those epochs, or beyond
the limits of those countries.
But you may discern what are the true elements
inseparable from our human nature, first, by in-
terrogating — as I suggested elsewhere — the instincts
of your own souls, and then by testing and verifying
these by the tradition of all the ages, and of every
country, in order to judge whether those instincts are
such as have always been the instincts of Humanity.
And those things which the innate voice within your-
selves and the grand voice of Humanity alike de-
clare to be essential elements, constitutive of life
itself, have to be modified and developed from epoch
to epoch, but can never be abolished.
Among the essential elements of human life — such
as Religion, Association, Liberty, and others to which
I have alluded in the course of this work — Property
is one,
I20 THE DUTIES OF MAN.
The first principle and origin of property is in hu-
man nature itself. It represents the necessities of
the material life of the individual, which it is his
duty to maintain. Even as the individual is bound
to transform the moral and intellectual world,
through the medium of religion, science, and liberty,
so he is bound to transform, ameliorate, and govern
the physical world, through the medium of material
labour. And property is the sign and representative
of the fulfillment of that task, of the amount of la-
bour by which the individual has transformed, devel-
oped, and increased, the productive forces of nature.
The Principle of property is therefore eternal, and
you will find it recognized and protected throughout
the whole existence of Humanity. But the modes by
which it is governed are mutable, and destined — like
every other manifestation of life — to undergo the law
of Progress. They who, finding property once con-
stituted and established in a certain manner, declare
that manner to be inviolable, and struggle against
every effort to transform it, thus deny progress
itself.
It is enough to take up two volumes of history,
treating of two different epochs, to find an alteration
in the constitution of property. And they who, be-
cause at a given epoch they happen to find property
ill-constituted, declare that it must be abolished and
seek to cancel it from Society, deny one of the ele-
ments of human nature, and would — were it possible
they should succeed — retard progress by mutilating
life. Property, however, would inevitably reappear
shortly after, and probably in the identical shape it
wore at the period of its abolition.
THE ECONOMICAL QUESTION. 121
Property is ill-constituted at the present day, be-
cause the source and origin of its actual division was,
generally speaking, in conquest; in the violence by
which, at a period remote from our own day, certain
invading peoples or classes took possession either of
land or of the fruits of labour not their own. Prop-
erty is ill-constituted at the present day, because the
bases of the partition of the fruits of a labour
achieved by both proprietor and workman are not
laid down in a just and equal proportion to the
labour done. Property is ill-constituted, because,
while it confers on its possessor political aud legisla-
tive rights which are denied to the non-possessor, it
t^nds to become the monopoly of the few, inaccessi-
ble to the many. Property is ill-constituted, because
the system of taxation is ill-constituted, and tends to
maintain the privilege of wealth in the hands of the
proprietor, while it oppresses the poorer classes, and
renders saving impossible to them.
But if, instead of correcting the errors, and slowly
modifying the constitution of property, you should
seek to abolish it, you would suppress a source of
wealth, of emulation, and of activity, and would
resemble the savage who cuts down the tree in order
to gather its fruit.
We must not seek to abolish property because at
present it is the possession of the few: we must open ^
up the paths by which the many may acquire it. We
must go back to the principle which is its legitimiza-
tion, and endeavour that it shall in future be the result
of labour alone. We must lead Society towards es-
tablishing a more equitable basis of remuneration be-
tween the proprietor or capitalist and the workman.
122 THE DUTIES OF MAN.
We must transform the system of taxation so as to
exempt the first necessaries of life therefrom, and thus
render that economy, which gradually produces prop-
erty, possible to workingmen. And in order that
these things may be, we must suppress the political
privilege now conceded to property, and allow to all
a share in the work of legislation.
Now, all these things are both just and possible. By
/'educating yourselves, and organizing yourselves earn-
J estly to demand them and determine to have them,
you may obtain them; whereas, by seeking the aboli-
tion of property, you would seek an impossibility, do
an injustice to those who have already acquired it
through their own labour, and diminish instead of
increasing production.
Nevertheless, the abolition of individual property
is the remedy proposed by many of the Socialist
systems of which I have spoken to you, and above all
by Communism.
Others have gone even further, and observing that
the Religious idea, the idea of Government, and the
idea of Country, are disfigured and falsified by relig-
ious error, by class privilege, and dynastic selfishness,
they demand the abolition of all religion, of all gov-
ernment, and even of Nationality. This is the con-
duct of children or barbarians. Might they not with
as much reason declare that, disease being frequently
generated by the corruption of the atmosphere, they
demand the suppression of every respiratory gas?
But the teachings of these men, who seek to found
anarchy in the name of liberty, and to destroy society
for the sake of the rights of the individual, require no
further confutation from me to you. The whole of
THE ECONOMICAL QUESTION. 123
my work is directed against this guilty dream, which
is the negation of progress, of duty, of human fra-
ternity, of the solidarity of nations, and of all those
things which you and I hold in veneration.
Those who, confining themselves within the limits
of the economic question, demand the abolition of in-
dividual property, and the organization of commun-
ism, fall into another extreme — the negation of the
individual and of liberty — which would close the path
to progress, and (so to speak) petrify Society.
The following is the general formula of Commun-
ism:
The property of every element of production, such
as land, capital (movable or immovable), instruments
of labour, etc., to be concentrated in the State. The
State to assign to each man his portion of labour
and his portion of compensation, some say with abso-
lute equality, others say according to his wants.
Such a mode of existence, were it possible, would
be the existence of the beaver, not the life of a man.
Liberty, dignity, and individual conscience would
all disappear before this organization of productive
machines. The satisfaction of the wants of physical
life may be possible by such means, but intellectual
and moral life would be entirely destroyed, and with
it all emulation, all free choice of labour, all liberty
of association, all the joys of property, and, in short,
all that stimulates and urges man to production. The
human family, under such a system, becomes a mere
human flock or herd, and all that is necessary for it is
a wide pasture-ground.
Which of you could reconcile himself to such a pro-
gramme? Equality is thus realized, say they. What
t24 THE DUTIES OF MAN.
equality? Equality in the distribution of labour?
That is impossible. Labour is in its nature various,
and cannot be fairly calculated either by its duration
or by the amount achieved in a given time; but rather
by its difficulty, or by the more or less agreeable
nature of the work done, the amount of hunian vital
ity it consumes, and its utility to Society.
How can the equality or difference between an
hour's labour passed in a mine, or in purifying the
stagnant waters of a marsh, and an hour's labour
spent in a spinning-factory, be estimated ? The im-
possibility of making such calculations fairly has, in
fact, suggested to some of the founders of these sys-
tems the idea of compelling every man to perform
in his turn a certain amount of labour in every
branch of useful activity; an absurd remedy, which
would render perfection of production impossible,
while it would be impotent to equalize the weak with
the strong, the intellectually clever with the slow,
the man with nervpus temperament with the man of
lymphatic tendency, etc. The labour which is easy
and welcome to the one becomes irksome and diffi-
cult to the other.
Would it produce equality in the division of the
products of labour ?
This also is impossible. Either the equality must
be absolute (and this would result in great injustice,
as there would be no distinction remaining between
the different wants arising from organization, or be-
tween the power and capacity created by a sense of
duty and the power and capacity given, without
merit or desert, by nature) or the equality must be
relative, and calculated according to diversity of
THE ECONOMICAL QUESTIOK. 12^
wants, and then, by taking no account of individual
production, it would violate those rights of property
which ought to be the reward of the workman's
labour.
Moreover, who should be the Arbitrator and decide
the just wants of each individual ? Should this Arbi-
trator be the State ?
Workingmen! brothers! are you disposed to accept
a hierarchy of head-masters of the common property?
— masters of the mind through the superiority given
by an exclusive education, masters of the body from
their power of determining the work you have to do,
your capacity to do it, and your wants when it is
done? Is not this a return to bygone slavery? Would
not these ^nasters, beguiled by that theory of interests
of which they were the representatives, and seduced
by the immense power concentrated in their hands,
become again the founders of the hereditary dictator-
ship of bygone castes?
No; Communism would not realize equality among
the sons of labour; it would not tend to increase pro-
duction* — which is the great need at the present day
— because it is in the nature of most men, when once
the means of existence are secured to them, to rest
satisfied; and the amount of incentive remaining to
increase production, diffused over all the members of
society, would be so small as not to have the power
of rousing and exciting men's faculties. The quality
' It has been calculated that, if one workman among a hundred
thousand should produce the value of a hundred francs over the
mean production of the community, he would gain as his own
share the thousandth part of a franc, or three cents every thirty
years. Can this be regarded as a stimulus to production ?
i26 THE DUtlES Of MAM.
of proauctJon would not be improved, as no encour-
agement would be offered to progress in invention,
which could never be wisely furthered by an uncer-
tain and unintelligent collective direction and organi-
zation.
The only remedy Communism has to offer for all
the thousand ills that afflict the sons of the people, is
security against hunger.
Now, are there no other means of achieving this?
Cannot the workman's right to life and labour be se-
cured without overturning the whole social organism,
without rendering production sterile, and without im-
peding progress by destroying individual liberty to
enchain it thus in a tyrannical, military organization?
The remedy for your sufferings cannot be found in
any arbitary general organization, built up in a day
by any one individual mind, opposed to the univer-
sally received bases of civilization, and suddenly im-
posed by decree. We are not here to create Human-
ity, but to continue it. We may, we ought to, modify
the organization of its constituent elements, but we
cannot suppress or destroy them. Humanity rebels,
and ever will rebel, against the attempt. The time
spent in an endeavour to realize these illusions would
therefore be time lost.
The remedy is not to be found in any increase of
wages imposed by governmental authority, and, unac-
companied by other changes, tending to increase cap-
ital. An increased rate of wages— that is to say, an
increase of the eost of production — would carry with
it an increase in the price of production, a consequent
diminution of consumption, and hence of work for the
producers.
THE ECONOMICAL QUESTION. I 27
The remedy is not to be found in any theory tend-
ing to destroy individual liberty, which is the conse-
cration of, and stimulus to, labour, nor in anything
tending to diminish capital, which is the source and
the instrument of labour and production.
The remedy is to be found in the union of labour and
capital in the same hands.
When society shall recognize no other distinction
save the distinction between producers and consumers;
or rather when every man shall be alike producer and
consumer; when the profits of labour, instead of being
parcelled out among that series of intermediates —
which (beginning with the capitalists and ending with
the retailer) frequently increases the price of produc-
tion fifty percent. — shall belong entirely to those who
perform the labour, all the permanent causes of your
poverty will be removed.
Your future depends upon your emancipation from
the exactions of capital, which is at present the arbi-
trary ruler of a production in which it has no share.
Your material and moral future. Look around you.
Wherever you find capital and labour in the same
hands — wherever the profits of labour are divided
among the workmen in proportion to the increase of
those profits and to the amount of aid given by the
workmen to the collective work — you will find both a
decrease of poverty and an increase of morality.
In the canton of Zurig, in the Engadine, and in
many other parts of Switzerland, where the peasant
is a proprietor, and land, capital, and labour are united
in the hands of a single individual; in Norway, Flan-
ders, and Eastern Friesland; in Holstein, in the Ger-
man Palatinate, in Belgium, and in the Island of
128 THE DUTIES OF MAI*.
Guernsey, on the English coast, there is visible a pros •
perity comparatively superior to all the other parts of
Europe, where the cultivators are not the proprietors
of the soil.
These countries are peopled by a race of agricul-
turists remarkable for their honesty, dignity, inde-
pendence, and frank and open bearing.
The mining population of Cornwall in England, and
those American navigators who trade as whalers be-
tween China and America, amongst whom this partici-
pation in the. profits of their labour obtains, are rec-
ognized and admitted by official documents to be su-
perior to the workmen who are remunerated by a pre-
determined rate of wages.
Association of labour , and the division of the fruits of
labour y or rather of the profits of the sale of its produc-
tions, between the producers, in proportion to the amount and
value of the work done by each — this is the social future.
You were once slaves, then serfs, then hirelings.
You have but to will it, in order shortly to be-
come free producers and brothers, through Asso-
ciation.
Association — but free, voluntary, and organized on
certain bases, by yourselves, among men who know,
esteem, and love each other; not imposed by the force
of governmental authority, without respect to indi-
vidual ties and affections, upon men regarded rather
as ciphers and machines of production than as beings
moved by spontaneous impulse and free will.
Association — but to be administered with a truly re-
publican fraternity by your own delegates, and from
which you should be free to withdraw at your own
discretion; not subject to the despotism of the State
THE ECONOMICAL QUESTION. 1^9
or of an arbitarily constituted hierarchy, ignorant of
your individual wants and position.
An Association of nuclei — groups — to be formed
according to your own tendencies, and not (as the
authors of the systems of which I have spoken teach)
of all the members of a given branch of industrial or
agricultural activity.
The concentration of all the members of the State,
or even of all the citizens of a single city, following a
given trade, into one sole productive society, would lead
us back to the bygone tyrannical monopoly of the cor-
porations. It would make of the producer the arbitrary
judge of prices to the injury of the consumer; legal-
ize the oppression of the minority; shut out the work-
man who might be unsatisfied or discontented with
its regulations from all possibility of finding work;
and sjuppress the necessity of progress, by extinguish-
ing all rivalry in work, and all stimulus to invention.
Within the last twenty years Association has oc-
casionally been timidly attempted in France, in Bel-
gium, and in England, and it has been crowned with
success wherever it was commenced with energy,
resolution, and a spirit of self-sacrifice.*
In Association is the germ of an entire social
transformation, a transformation which, by emanci-
pating you from the servitude of wages, will gradually
further and increase production and improve the eco-
nomical position of the country.
* See, on this subject, Self-help by the People ^ and The History of
Cooperation in Halifax^ written by G. J. Hoiyoake (London Book
Store, 282 Strand) valuable and encouraging little books which
should b^ in th^ hands of working people. — Translator's Note.
IJO THE DUTIES OF MAN.
The tendency of the present system is to make the
capitalist seek to increase his gains in order to with-
draw from the arena: while the tendency of associa-
tion would be to secure the continuance of labour —
that is to say, of production.
At present the master, the director of the work
done, who generally owes his position to no special
aptitude but to mere possession of capital, is liable to
be improvident, rashly speculative, or incompetent;
an association, directed by chosen delegates, and
watched over by all its members, would not run the
risk of suffering from such errors or defects.
Under the present system labour is too often di-
rected to the production of superfluities rather than
necessaries, and owing to a capricious and unjust in-
equality of pay, workmen in one branch of activity
abound, while they are wanting in another branch.
The workman, limited to a determinate recompense,
has no motive to spend all the zeal and energy of
which he is capable upon his work, in order to multi-
ply and improve its produce.
Evidently Association would offer a remedy to.this
and many other causes both of interruption and in-
feriority of production.
Liberty of withdrawal for individual members,
without injury to the Association — equality of all the
members in the choice of an elective administration,
with powers either renewable at a given period, or,
better, subject to revocation — freedom of admission
posterior to the foundation of the Association, with-
out the obligation of introducing new capital, but
with permission to supply its place by an annual con-
tribution to the treasury of the Association, to be d^-*
THE ECONOMICAL QUESTION. I3I
ducted from the profits of the first years of union —
indivishility and perpetuity of the collective capital — s uch
an amount of compensation as secures the necessities
of life equally to all — free distribution of the tools or
instruments of labour to all, according to the quantity
and quality of the work done ; such are the general
bases upon which you must found your associations, if
you are willing to achieve a work of present self-sacri-
fice for the benefit of the class to which you belong.
Each of these bases, and above all that concerning
the perpetuity of the collective capital, which is the
pledge of your own emancipation and your link with
future generations; would require a chapter to itself.
But a special study of the question of workingmen's
associations does not enter into the plan of my pres-
ent work. Perhaps, should God grant me some few
more years of life, I may make of this study a separ-
ate labour of love for you. In the meantime, rest as-
sured that the rules I have just sketched for you are
the result of d6ep reflection and earnest study, and
deserve your attentive consideration.
But the capital ? The capital by which association
is to be initiated in the first instance; whence to ob-
tain this ?
It is a grave question, and I cannot treat it at such
length as I would wish. But I may briefly point out
your own duty and that of others.
The first source of that capital is in yourselves, in
your own economy, your own spirit of self-sacrifice.
I know the position of too many of you, but there
are some of you who — either owing to a continuance
of work or its better compensation — are in a position
to economise for this aim, Some eighteen or twenty
132 . THE DUTIES OF MAN.
of these might thus collect the trifling sum necessary
to enable you to commence work on your own
account. And the consciousness of fulfilling a sol-
emn duty, and thus deserving your emancipation,
ought to give you strength to do this.
I might quote for you many industrial associations,
now well established and flourishing, which were be-
gun by a few workmen with their savings of a penny
a day. I might relate to you many stories of sacri-
fices heriocally endured in France* and elsewhere,
by the first few workmen who commenced such en-
terprises, and are now in possession of considerable
capital. There is, indeed, scarcely any difficulty
which may not be overcome by strong will, when
1 In 1848, the delegates of some hundreds of workmen who had
' united together with the idea of establishing a pianoforte manufac-
tory upon the Associative principles, finding tiiat a large capital
was necessary for their undertaking, applied to the Government
Tor a loan of 300,000 francs. The application was refused. The
association was dissolved, but fourteen workmen determined to
, overcome every obstacle and reconstitute it out of their own re-
sources. They had neither money nor credit : they had faith.
They initiated their society with a capital consisting of tools and
instruments of labour of the value of about 2,000 francs. But a
' floating capital was indispensable.
Each of these workmen contrived, not without great difficulty,
to contribute 10 francs, and other workmen, not belonging to their
society, added some little offerings to swell their capital. On the
loth of March, 1849, having collected the sum of 229 francs 50
centimes, the Association was declared to be founded.
But their little social fund was insufficient for the cost of start-
ing and the small daily incidental expenses of their establishment.
Nothing remained for wages, and two months passed without the
members of the Association receiving a single cent in remunera-
THE ECONOMICAL QUESTION. 133
Sustained by the consciousness of doing good. Al-
most all of you may contribute some trifling aid to
the primary little fund, either in money, raw mate-
rial, or implements of labour.
By a consistent course of conduct and habits of
life, calculated to win the esteem of your companions
or relations, you may induce them to advance small
loans, in consideration of which they might become
shareholders, and receive the interest of their money
from the profits of the enterprise.
In many branches of industry in which the price
of tools or of raw material is trifling, the capital re-
quired for commencing work on your own account is
small, and you may collect or save it among your-
tion for their labour. How did they subsist during this time of
crisis ? As workingmen do subsist in periods when they are with-
out work, through help given by their comrades, or by selling or
pawning their goods.
Some orders, however, had been executed, and these were paid
for on the 4th of May. 1849. That day was to the Association
what the first victory is in war, and they determined to celebrate it.
Having paid all urgent debts, each associate received a sum of 6
francs 61 centimes. It was agreed that each should keep 5 francs,
and that the remainder should be spent in a fraternal banquet. The
fourteen members, most of whom had not tasted wine for more
than a year, sat down to a common dinner with their families.
The cost was 32 sous a family. For another month their wages
only reached 5 francs a week. In June, however, a baker, eithef
a lover of music or a speculator, proposed to buy a pianoforte
from them, and pay for it in bread. The offer was accepted, and
the price agreed upon was 480 francs. This was a piece of good
fortune for the Association, which was thus sure of the first nee*
essary of life. The price of the bread was not considered in the
wages of the members. E^ch man received the amount necessary
134 I'ttfi DUTlfiS of MAN.
selves if you resolutely determine to do so. And it
will be in every respect better for you that the capi-
tal be all your own, acquired by the sweat of your
own brows, and of the credit you have gained by con-
scientious work.
Even as those nations which have achieved their lib-
for his own consumption, and the married men enough for their
families.
By degrees, the Association, the members of which were very
clever workmen, surmounted the obstacles and privations of the
first period of its existence. Their books gave excellent testi-
mony to their progress. In the month of August the weekly earn-
ings of each member rose from lo to 15 and 20 francs: nor did
this represent the whole of their profits, for each member paid into
the common fund a weekly contribution larger than the sum he
withdrew as wages for his own use.
On the 30th of December, 1850, the books of the Association re-
vealed the following encouraging facts:
The members at that date amounted to thirty-two.
The establishment was paying 2,000 francs per annum for rent,
and their premises were already too small for their business.
The value of the tools, etc., belonging to the Society was 5,922
francs, 66 centimes.
The value of their goods and raw material amounted to 22,972
francs 28 centimes.
The cash-box of the Society contained bills for 3,540 francs.
Open credits, almost all good, amounted to 5,861 francs 99 cen-
times.
Their stock, therefore, amounted to 38,296 francs 93 centimes.
The Society only owed 4,737 francs 80 centimes of ordinary busi-
ness debts, and 1,65 francs to eighty well-wishers to the Associa-
tion among workingmen in the same trade, for small ]oans ad-
vanced to the Association at its commencement.
The net balance in favour of the Society was therefore, 31,-
909.13 francs.
Since then the Association has never ceased to flourish.
THE ECONOmCAL QUESTIOl*. I3S
erty by shedding their own blood, are those which best
know how to preserve it, so your associations will de-
rive a better and more durable profit from the capital
acquired through your own labour, watchfulness, and
economy, than from that obtained from any other
source. This is the nature of things. The Working-
men's Associations which were founded with govern-
mental aid in Paris in 1848 prospered far less than
those whose first capital was the fruit of the men's
own sacrifices.
But, although I — loving you too earnestly for servile
adulation — thus admonish you of the points of weak-
ness which either exist or may arise among you, and
exhort you to self-sacrifice, this in no way diminishes
the duties of others towards you.
Those to whom circumstances have granted wealth
ought to understand this. They ought to understand
that the emancipation of your class is a part of the
Providential design, and that it will be accomplished
whether with them or against them. Many of them
do understand it, and amongst these, if you give them
proofs of an earnest and determined will, and of an
honest intelligence, you will find help in your under-
takings. They can — and if they are once convinced
that your endeavour after Association is not the de-
sire of a day, but the faith of a majority among you
— they will smooth your path towards obtaining
credit, either by advances of money, by establishing
banks giving credit to collective bodies of workmen
for work to be done, or possibly, by admitting you to a
share in the profits of their establishments, as an inter-
mediate step between the past and future, which
might probably enable you to put together the small
136 THE DUTIES OF MAN.
amount of capital necessary for the fornration of an
independent Association.
In Belgium, banks, called Banks of Anticipationy or
Banks of the People^ already exist, offering such facili-
ties as I have described. In Scotland, also, I believe,
there are many banks willing to give credit to any
man of known probity, ready to pledge his own hon-
our, and able to offer the security of one other indi-
vidual of equally good character. And the plan of
admitting the workmen to a participation in the
profits of the business has already been adopted by
several employers with remarkable success.*
' In Pan's, for instance, the house-painting establishment of M.
Leclaire is founded upon this principle, and is well-known for its
prosperous condition.
CHAPTER XII.
CONCLUSION.
But the State, the Government — an institution only
legitimate when based upon a mission of education
and progress not yet understood — the State has a sol-
emn duty towards you, a duty which will be easy of
fulfillment when we have a really National Govern-
ment, the Government of a free and united people.
A vast series of means of help might be bestowed
by the Government upon the people, by which the
social problem might be solved without spoliation,
violent measures or interference with the wealth pre-
viously acquired by any of its citizens, and without
exciting that immoral and unjust antagonism between
class and class, fatal to the national welfare, which
visibly retards the progress of France at the present
day.
The following would be important and powerful
modes of assistance :
The exercise of a moral influence in favour of the
association of workingmen by the publicly manifested
approval of the Government agents, by a frequent dis-
cussion of their fundamentary principles in the House
of Representatives, and by legalizing all the volun-
tary associations constituted on the basis indicated
above.
I3S tHBl DUtlfiS OF MAJJ.
/ Improved methods of communication, and the aboli-
tion of the obstacles now impeding the free convey-
ance of produce.
The establishment of public magazines and depdts
in which the approximate value of the goods or mer-
chandise consigned having been ascertained, the As-
sociations should receive a document or receipt nego-
tiable in the manner of a bank-bill, by which means
the Associations would be enabled to carry on their
affairs without the ruinous necessity of an immediate
sale without regard to prices.
The concession of the execution of necessary pub-
lic works to Workingmen's Associations upon equal
terms to those granted to individual contractors.
The simplification of judicial forms, justice being at
present ruinously costly, and too often inaccessible to
the poor.
Legal facilities given for the sale and transfer of
landed property.
A radical transformation of the system of taxation,
by the substitution of one sole tax upon income for
the present complex and expensive system of direct
and indirect taxation. This would give public and
practical sanction to the principle of the sacredness of
human life^ for as neither labour, progress, nor the
fulfillment of duty are possible without life, a given
amount of money, the amount judged necessary to the
maintenance of life, should be exempt from all taxa-
tion.
But there are further means :
The secularization or appropriation of ecclesiastical
property by the State — a thing not at present to be
thought of, yet, nevertheless, inevitable in the future,
y
/
CONCLi;siO)^J. tig
when the State shall assume its true educational mis-
sion — will place a vast sum of wealth in the hands of
the nation. To this may be added the value of hith-
erto unreclaimed land, and the profits of railways
and other public enterprises, the administration of
which should be in the hands of the State; the value
of the landed property belonging to the communes,*
the value of property now descending by collateral
succession beyond the fourth degree, and which
should revert to the State, and many other sources of
wealth which it is unnecessary here to enumerate.
Suppose all this mass of wealth and resources
accumulated in the formation of a National Fund, to
be consecrated to the intellectual and economic prog-
ress of the whole country. Why should not a con-
siderable portion of such a fund be employed (proper
provision being made to guard against its wasteful
use or dissipation) as a Fund of Credit, bearing inter-
est at one and a half or two per cent., to be distrib-
uted to the Voluntary Workingmen's Associations,
constituted according to the bases indicated above, and
giving evidence of morality and capacity ? This sum
of capital to be hel4 sacred, not merely to the promo-
tion of labour in the present generation, but in futur-
ity ; its operation being upon so vast a scale as to
ensure compensation for the occasional inevitable
losses it would have to sustain.
' This property belongs legally to the communes, morally to the
poor of the communes. I do not mean that such property should
be taken from the communes, but that it should be consecrated to
the poor of each commune, and thus constituted, under the super-
vision of elective communal councils, the inalienable Capital of
Agricultural Associations.
14<^ THE DUTIES OF MAI*.
The distribution of the Fund of Credit ought not
to be in the hands either of the Government or of a
National Central Bank, but of local Banks, adminis-
tered by elective Municipal Councils, under the
supervision of the Central Government.
Without subtracting anything from the actual
wealth of any existing class, and without enriching
any single class through the medium of that taxation
which, being contributed by all citizens, should be
employed for the advantage and benefit of all ; such
a series of measures as are here suggested, by diffus-
ing credit, increasing and improving production,
compelling a diminution of the rate of interest,
and intrusting the progress and continuity of labour
to the zeal and interest of the producers, would re-
place the limited and ill-directed sum of wealth at
present concentrated in a few hands, by a wealthy
nation, directress of its own production and con-
sumption.
Such, Workingmen, is your future. You may hasten
this future. Conquer for yourselves your coun-
try, and a truly popular Government, the representa-
tive of your collective life and mission. Organize
yourselves in a vast league of the people, so that your
voice shall be the voice of the million, not merely of a
few individuals. Truth and justice will be on your
side, and the Nation will listen to you.
But, be warned! and believe the words of a man
who has been earnestly studying the course of events
in Europe during the last thirty years, and who has
seen the holiest enterprises fail in the hour of prom-
ised success through the errors or immorality of their
supporters. You will never succeed unless through
CONCLUSION. 141
your own improvement. You can only obtain the exercise
of your rights by deserving them through your own
activity and your own spirit of love and sacrifice.
If you seek your rights in the name of duties fulfilled
or to fulfill, you will obtain them. If you seek them
in the name of selfishness, or any theory of happiness
and well-being propounded by the teachers of mate-
rialism, you will never achieve other than a momen-
tary triumph, to be followed by utter delusion.
They who appeal to you in the name of well-being
and happiness, will deceive and betray you. They
seek only their own well-being and happiness, and
merely desire to unite with you as an element of
strength wherewith to overcome the obstacles in their
own path. When once they have obtained their own
rights through your help, they will abandon the
effort to obtain yours in order to enjoy their own.
Such is the history of the last half -century, and the
name of this last half-century is. Materialism.
Sad story of blood and sorrow! I have seen them
in my own land — these men who denied God, relig-
ion, virtue, and sacrifice, and spoke only in the name
of the right to happiness and enjoyment — I have seen
them advance boldly to the struggle with the words
People and Liberty on their lips, and unite with us
men of a better faith, who imprudently admitted
them in our ranks. As soon as a first victory, or the
opportunity of some cowardly compromise, opened
the path of enjoyment to them, they forsook the
cause of the people, and became our bitterest enemies
the day after. A few years of danger and persecu-
tion were sufficient to weary and discourage them.
And wherefore should they, men without any qon-
142 THE DUTIES OF MAN.
scientious belief in a Law of Duty, without faith in
a mission imposed upon man by a Supreme Power,
have persisted in sacrifice even to the last years of
Rfe?
And I have seen, with deep sadness, the sons of
the people, educated in materialism by those men,
turn false to their mission and their future, false to
their country and themselves, betrayed by some fool-
ish, immoral hope of obtaining material happiness,
through furthering the caprice or interest of a des-
potism.
I have seen the workingmen of France stand by,
indifferent spectators of the coupd'itat of the second of
December, because all the great social questions had
dwindled in their minds into a question of material
prosperity; and they foolishly believed that the
promises, artfully made to them by him who had
destroyed the liberty of their country, would be kept.
Now they mourn over their lost liberty, without
having acquired even the promised material well-
being.
No; without God, without the sense of a moral law,
Without morality, without a spirit of sacrifice, and
by merely following after men who have neither
faith, nor reverence for truth, nor holiness of life,
nor aught to guide them but the vanity of their own
systems — I repeat it with deep conviction — you will
never succeed. You may achieve ^meutes^ but you
will never realize the true Great Revolution you and
I alike desire — a revolution, not the offspring and
illusion of irritated selfishness, but of religious con-
viction.
Your own imprcvement and that of others ; this must
CONCLUSION. 143
be the supreme hope and aim of every social trans-
formation.
You cannot change the fate of man by merely em-f^
bellishing his material dwelling. You will never in-
duce the society to which you belong to substitute a
system of Association for a system of salary and
wages, unless you convince them that your associa-
tion will result in improved production and collec-
tive prosperity. And you can only prove this by
showing yourselves capable of founding and main-
taining associations through your own honesty,
mutual good-will, love of labour, and capacity of
self-sacrifice.
In order to progress, you must show yourselves
capable of progress.
Tradition, Progress, Association. These three i
things are sacred. Twenty years ago I wrote :
" I believe in the grand voice of God which the
Ages transmit to us through the universal tradition
of Humanity, and it teaches me that the Family, the
Nation, and Humanity, are the three spheres in
which the human individual is destined to labour for
the common good towards the moral perfection of
himself and others.
" It teaches me that property is destined to be tne
manifestation of the material activity of the individ-
ual, of his share in the transformation of the physical
world; as the franchise is the manifestation of his
share in the administration of the political world.
** It teaches me that the merit or demerit of the
individual, before God and man, depends upon his
use of these rights; and it teaches me that all these
things, being elements of human nature, are peren-
146 THE DUTIES OF MAN.
owed to your country. The amelioration of your
present condition can only result from your partici-
pation in the political life of the Nation. Until you
can obtain the franchise, your wants and aspirations
will never be truly represented.
On the day in which you should foHow the ex-
ample of too many French Socialists, and separate
the social from the political question, saying : " We
will work out our own emancipation^ whatever be the
form of Institution by which our country is governed "
— that day you would have yourselves decreed the
perpetuity of your own social servitude.
And in bidding you farewell, I will remind you of
another duty not less solemn than that which binds
you to achieve and preserve the freedom and unity of
your Country.
Your complete emancipation can only be founded
and secured upon the triumph of a Principle — the
principle of the Unity of the Human Family.
At the present day one half of the Human Family
— that half from which we seek both inspiration and
consolation, that half to which the first education of
childhood is entrusted — is, by a singular contradic-
tion, declared civilly, politically, and socially unequal
and excluded from the great Unity.
To you who are seeking your own enfranchisement
and emancipation in the name of a Religious Truth,
to you it belongs to protest on every occasion and by
every means against this negation of Unity.
The Emancipation of Woman, then, must be re-
garded by you as necessarily linked with the emanci-
pation of the workingman. This will give to your
endeavours the consecration of a Universal Truth.
A CLEAR JJiD HOPLFVL EXPOSITION
OF TOLSTOrs TEJCHIfiGS
TOLSTOY AND
HIS PROBLEMS
Ewi)-! bv AYLMER MAUDE
Each eB*T in tha voiiime ocprcsscs, in one (bna
or other, ToUsor's riews of lite; and the main objeci
of the book u not lo pnuie his vieifs but to eipUin
llum. Bong the only Englishman ivbo. in recent
yem, has Iiad the advantage oi indintic persoiul
intercourse, continued over a period of some vcars,
with Tobtoy, Mr, Maude is well ijiuMed for his
present wort.
CONTENTS
Tbi SUvtn
Biognphy of Toinoj
TolttDy's Teschingi
An ImrDduciiao la " Wluc
Ij Art'*'
How "RHunicrion'' Wn
Written
of Our Tim
Tht Tur'i CoToruiion
Right tni Wrong
War jbJ Pitrioti™
TjIIu With TolHoy
" Any one vrho takes up thii dellghlliil nria of nuyi will
not willingly U; it down without at leait the determination lu
finkh it.-— Briiiii FrinJ.
" Mr. Maude'i long and intinatf acquaintance urith Toliniif
enable! him to ipeat with knowledge probaWy not poNoacd by
iny other Englisbttian. " — Jllorning Poff.
ismn, a«i, 220 paga. Pnit, ft.OO
FUNK & WAGNALLS COMPANY, Publishers
NEW YORK AND LONDON
BY THE SAME AUTHOR
"A Great Book of a Great Epoch"
EDWIN MaEKIIAX toga: -II Aiu Kti/t.iai'iffM, fiio'"6rir
oitmriui.i'piiilaal iiawinn. B U a prfOHook lif a f/nal ipteh."
.H7LlAXtTdWTBOSy^Siin,f:"Hitlatola,ip€ati«0'"\fli-
miliar Miiyt, aiCh gmU'tiHpli'uit ami dlacietlnn,'
fJIAJlLHtl n. PAllKHVRST. D.J}., mv- "An MemUns,
THE RELIGION
OF DEMOCRACY
A Memorandum of Modern Principles
Otorgf Podgit. D.D., Demi fiiilscopsl TIiboI. SoLdoI. C«i&-
brldge, Hub.: "ItdtSecsfroinUiet'aneiilaix'IutuKy nallarlylf'*
Flwiih Iti-volatl™ dWe™ from ihc hlMOiy -.r Uie wmiiula. . . .
The rciitlur never IbIIe b) be admulaled and ii^ruugtluiiiid."
£lla IV'teltr WUmk; " 11 is h Glarlon ciill loa ti[g]ier r<lviU
OMton Tnuueripl! "ProbM m deep us rsrljle, nni) finilia
with tb« elreiigUi of Raakiu. ..."
Th» Smi, BaiMmorei "There la BtraD^Ui \n UOa book-diB
••A brilllunt^eearehing book. Ilial
m, Cliith. /"ricf. SIM. Post-paid
FUNK & WAGNALLS COMPANY, Pub'ri
llliOlilH
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